"I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble." --Helen Keller ------------------------------------------ "It is amazing how much people can get done if they do not worry about who gets the credit." --Sandra Swinney ------------------------------------------ "I don't know anything about luck. I've never banked on it, and I'm afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something else: hard work and realizing what it opportunity and what isn't." --Lucille Ball ------------------------------------------ "My parents always told me that people will never know how long it takes you to do something. They will only know how well it is done." --Nancy Hanks ------------------------------------------ "While I was in Ann Arbor I heard that Boston was a good place to play acoustic music because they still had plenty of clubs. So I moved to Cambridge. I roomed with a Harvard student. I got an apartment the first day I got to town by going to Harvard housing, so I could get cheaper rates, $80 a month or something. I even went to some Harvard classes, just to sit in, because I enjoyed the performance of the professors. The teachers were always so theatrical at Harvard, intelligent show business people, that could keep your attention, and that I think, is the great advantage of Harvard. So I used to go for the show, no matter what subject it was. You could just drop in to a class and watch, it wouldn't matter if you went to the school. No one even asked. The show was good and you would learn something, but you wouldn't get any credit for it. I didn't need the credit." (Negative Theatre 87) --Ric Ocasek ------------------------------------------ "He who angers you enslaves you." ------------------------------------------ "In three words, I can sum up everything I know about life: it goes on." --Robert Frost ------------------------------------------ "Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself." --Ana‹s Nin ------------------------------------------ "Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did, but she did it backwards and in high heels." --Faith Whittlesey ------------------------------------------ "Your real duty is to save your dream." --Mogdiliani ------------------------------------------ "If there is no wind, row." ------------------------------------------ "One good deed dying tongueless slaughters a thousand waiting upon that." --William Shakespeare ------------------------------------------ "There is danger in reckless change; but greater danger in blind conservatism." --Henry George ------------------------------------------ "Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely known. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark." --Agnes de Mille ------------------------------------------ "The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land." --T. H. Huxley ------------------------------------------ "The fact that someone says something doesn't mean it's true. Doesn't mean they're lying, but it doesn't mean it's true." --Carl Sagan ------------------------------------------ "I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live." --Francoise Sagan ------------------------------------------ "I tell you: one must have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you still have chaos in you." --Friedrich Nietzsche ------------------------------------------ "Often the real test of courage is not to die, but to live." --Vittorio Alfieri ------------------------------------------ "The right to express our thoughts means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own." --Erich Fromm ------------------------------------------ "The unexamined life is not worth living." --Socrates ------------------------------------------ "He loved to ask his mother questions. It was the pleasantest thing for him to ask a question and then to hear what answer his mother would give. Bambi was never surprised that question after question should come into his mind continually and without effort. He found it perfectly natural, and it delighted him very much. It was very delightful too, to wait expectantly till the answer came. If it turned out the way he wanted, he was satisfied. Sometimes, of course, he did not understand, but that was pleasant also because he was kept busy picturing what he had not understood, in his own way. Sometimes he felt very sure that his mother was not giving him a complete answer, was intentionally not telling him all she knew. And, at first, that was very pleasant, too. For then there would remain in him such a lively curiosity, such suspicion, mysteriously and joyously flashing through him, such anticipation, that he would become anxious and happy at the same time, and grow silent." (Bambi 20- 21) --Felix Salten ------------------------------------------ "There are no words that can be spoken to shatter the darkness. What is left is silence, and the dawn must creep at its own pace as we wait. There are no words for how we feel. The silence of the night is the only thing that captures it, and dawn the only thing to set it free. So we wait..." --Karla Jameson ------------------------------------------ "When he drank his coffee, that was all he did. If his com chimed or there was a caller at the door, he ignored it. He didn't read the newsfax, nor even listen to any of his favourite music. His one cup deserved, and got, his full attention. He'd once heard a story about a monastery on the top of some mountain in Japan or somewhere. After a long trek in the cold to get there, the monks would offer to sell you a cup of coffee. You had a choice: There was a two-dollar cup -- or a two-hundred- dollar cup. When pressed to explain the difference, the monks were reported to say, 'A hundred and ninety-eight dollars.'" (The Digital Effect 21-22) --Steve Perry ------------------------------------------ "A great attitude does much more than turn on the lights in our worlds; it seems to magically connect us to all sorts of serendipitous opportunities that were somehow absent before the change." --Earl Nightengale ------------------------------------------ "People are where they are because that's exactly where they really want to be...whether they'll admit that or not." --Earl Nightengale ------------------------------------------ "We can let circumstances rule us, or we can take charge and rule our lives from within." --Earl Nightengale ------------------------------------------ "Your world is a living expression of how you are using and have used your mind." --Earl Nightengale ------------------------------------------ "Am I motivated by what I really want out of life - or am I mass- motivated?" --Earl Nightengale ------------------------------------------ "All you need is the plan, the road map, and the courage to press on to your destination." --Earl Nightengale ------------------------------------------ "Success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal or ideal." --Earl Nightengale ------------------------------------------ "Whatever we plant in our subconscious mind and nourish with repetition and emotion will one day become a reality." --Earl Nightengale ------------------------------------------ "Other times I think about them, though -- all this October I have done so, it seems, because October is the time when men think mostly about far places and the roads which might get them there. I sit on the bench in front of Bell's Market and think about Homer Buckland and about the beautiful girl who leaned over to open his door when he come down that path with the full red gasoline can in his right hand -- she looked like a girl of no more than sixteen, a girl on her learner's permit, and her beauty was terrible, but I believe it would no longer kill the man it turned itself on; for a moment her eyes lit on me, I was not killed, although part of me died at her feet." (Mrs. Todd's) --Stephen King ------------------------------------------ "It means that no blue ribbon is forever. Someday -- if the world doesn't explode itself in the meantime -- someone will run a two-minute mile in the Olympics. It make take a hundred years or a thousand, but it will happen. Because there is no ultimate blue ribbon. There is zero, and there is eternity, and there is mortality, but there is no ultimate." (Mrs. Todd's Shortcut) --Stephen King ------------------------------------------ "The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand." --Vince Lombardi ------------------------------------------ "What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists and it becomes available only when a man is in that state of mind in which he knows exactly what he wants and is fully determined not to quit until he finds it." --Alexander Graham Bell ------------------------------------------ "Only a man who knows what it is like to be defeated can reach down to the bottom of his soul and come up with the extra ounce of power it takes to win when the match is even." --Muhammad Ali ------------------------------------------ "This environment [New York] is heaven. I love walking down the street and seeing faces and drama and happiness and sadness and dirt and cleanliness. I could never be a country person, sitting around trees trying to write a song. I would rather be in the middle of society, whether it's growing or crumbling." --Ric Ocasek ------------------------------------------ "If a life could have a theme song -- and I believe every worthwhile one has -- mine is a religion, an obsession, a mania or all of these expressed in one word -- individualism. I was born with that obsession, and I've never seen and do not know now a cause more worthy, more misunderstood, more seemingly hopeless and tragically needed." --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "Diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice doggie' until you can find a rock." --Will Rogers ------------------------------------------ "Congress, our leaders, voted against a proposal to have a national seven day waiting period to buy a gun. I don't want to sound like a Quaker, but when you think about it, is a week a long time to wait? To see if a former mental patient is qualified to own an Uzi? Con one, will ya Congress? It takes three weeks to get a phone!" --Jimmy Tingle ------------------------------------------ "Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple." --Barry Switzer ------------------------------------------ "I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn't poor, I was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy. I was deprived. (Oh not deprived but rather underprivileged.) Then they told me that underprivileged was overused. I was disadvantaged. I still don't have a dime. But I have a great vocabulary." --Jules Feiffer ------------------------------------------ "Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits." --Dan Barker ------------------------------------------ "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." --Derek Bok ------------------------------------------ "A man's ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death." --Albert Einstein ------------------------------------------ "Every time you meet a situation, though you think at the moment it is an impossibility and you go through the tortures of the damned, once you have met it and lived through it you find that forever after you are freer than you were before." --Eleanor Roosevelt ------------------------------------------ "I think life is really hard sometimes. It's not easy to wake up every day and go through what you go through. But the beautiful moments that you share with people that you love, or even experience alone, are worth all of the pain and sorrow. Those moments should be cherished, and I think that's what music is all about-to remind people of the beautiful moments that are in everybody's life." --Charlie Haden ------------------------------------------ "Some people would say my paintings show a future world and maybe they do, but I paint from reality. I put several things and ideas together, and perhaps, when I have finished, it could show the future. If people want to interpret my work as warnings about too much overpopulation, disease and mechanization in the future, then that is up to them. I like to combine human beings, creatures and biomechanics. And I love to work with bones -- they are elemental and function and, after all, are part of human beings. I have many bones in my home in Zurich, and I study them and use them as models. Some people say my work is often depressing and pessimistic, with the emphasis on death, blood, overcrowding, strange beings and so on, but I don't really think it is. There is hope and a kind of beauty in there somewhere, if you look for it." --H. R. Giger ------------------------------------------ "It was all very well to say, 'Drink me,' but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. 'No, I'll look first,' she said, 'and see whether it's marked 'Poison' or not.' For she had read several nice little stories about children who had got burnt and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long, and that if you cut your finger very deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds. And she had never forgotten that if you drink too much from a bottle marked 'Poison,' it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later." (Alice in Wonderland 13-14) --Lewis Carrol ------------------------------------------ "One of the expressions of Western over-reliance on technology can be seen in the lack of patience in industrial society. When you deal with technology, everything happens at the touch of a button. This conditions you to become so impatient that when you have an emotional or personal crisis, you don't allow time for the solution to take effect. This leads to all sorts of rash responses, like quarrels, fights and so on." --the Dali Lama (Lhamo Dhondrub) ------------------------------------------ "I agree that the fear of American cultural imperialism is shared by many people, and I agree with your point about the invasive nature of television culture. But I wouldn't draw the next inference: that this is negative and therefore it must be stopped. I feel that one should address this influence in a way that takes away the negative edge through a positive counter- response. This way, you reinforce and reaffirm your conviction in the inner values. You harness those beliefs and develop them with a greater degree of self-awareness. That's the kind of response people should have, instead of rejecting technology." --the Dali Lama (Lhamo Dhondrub) ------------------------------------------ "In contemporary American public culture, the legacy of the consumer revolution of the 1960s is unmistakable. Today, there are few things more beloved of our masses than the figure of the cultural rebel, the defiant individualist resisting the mandates of the machine civilization. Whether he is an athlete decked out in a mowhawk and multiple-pierced ears, a policeman who plays by his own rules, an actor on a motorcycle, a soldier of fortune with explosive bow and arrow, or a rock star in leather jacket and sunglasses, the rebel has become the paramount clich‚ of our popular entertainment, and the pre-eminent symbol of the system he is supposed to be subverting. In advertising especially, he rules supreme." (The Conquest of Cool) --Thomas Frank ------------------------------------------ "An invasion of armies can be resisted. But not an idea whose time has come." --Victor Hugo ------------------------------------------ "Sometimes it seems like we're all living in some kind of prison, and the crime is how much we all hate ourselves. It's good to get really dressed up once in a while and admit the truth -- that when you really look closely, people are so strange and so complicated that they're actually beautiful. Possibly even me." --from My So-Called Life ------------------------------------------ "I just want them to feel inspired to live on the planet and not get discouraged with life, and make sure that they pursue what they feel they ought to. If they want to collect stamps, make sure they collect stamps 100 percent of the time for 25 years. I think the most important thing is to try to find work or something that you love, but it's also probably the hardest thing. Life in general is more generic and less artistic. It's a hard thing to pull your mind away from the shit and feel positive about where things are going. It depends on how much TV news you watch." --Ric Ocasek ------------------------------------------ "I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something -- a great deal -- to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing; and that we can deflect words by trivialization, of course, but also by ritualized respect, or we can let them enter our souls and mix with the juices of our minds." (Toward a More Feminist Criticism) --Adrienne Rich ------------------------------------------ "I can't believe I'm having this conversation... With you! You've probably never read a book in your life that wasn't written by John Grisham. You don't get it. People like you are so content to write-off English. English just isn't about analysing stories -- if it was, I wouldn't be like this. Stories, novels, whatever... reflect something about the writer... and the culture... and the society that it came from. It's a mirror -- a mirror to ourselves. And when we do it right, when we just get it, we know something about ourselves. English is an understanding of the self. If we can see ourselves clearly, we know the right decision to make. And if you don't know who you are and make the wrong choices, what good is it if you can make two-hundred and fifty thousand?" (The Open Door) --Tyler Powell ------------------------------------------ "Let me tell you something. We're all guilty of something. Cruelty or greed or going sixty-five in a fifty-five mile per hour zone. But you know what? You want to think of yourself as the fair haired choir boy, you go ahead. ... I'm saying you've got a darkness inside of you. You've got to know the darker, uglier sides of yourself. You've got to recognize them so they're not constantly sneaking up on you. You've got to love them because they're a part of you, because along with your virtues, they make you who you are. Virtue isn't virtue unless it slams up against vice so, consequently, your virtue is not real virtue until it's been tested... and tempted." --from Homicide: Life on the Street ------------------------------------------ "A soulmate is someone who has locks that fit our keys, and keys to fit our locks. When we feel safe enough to open the locks, our truest selves step out and we can be completely and honestly who we are; we can be loved for who we are and not for who we're pretending to be. Each unveils the best part of the other. No matter what else goes wrong around us, with that one person we're safe in our own paradise. Our soulmate is someone who shares our deepest longings, our sense of direction. When we're two balloons, and together our direction is up, chances are we've found the right person. Our soulmate is the one who makes life come to life." (Bridge 265) --Richard Bach ------------------------------------------ "What was the question? ... Oh. Where do I get my crazy ideas? Answer: sleep-fairy, walk-fairy, shower-fairy. Book-fairy. And in these last few years, from my wife. Now when I have questions I ask her and she tells me the answer. If you haven't already, I'd suggest you want to find your soulmate, soon as you can. Next question?" (Bridge 264) --Richard Bach ------------------------------------------ "She didn't mean to be sexy that moment, but even a winter nightgown couldn't hide that lovely outline. When will I outgrow my simple-minded fascination with the form she had happened to choose for her body? Never, I thought." (Bridge 249) --Richard Bach ------------------------------------------ "What a story that would make! How many men and women go through the same rivers, menaced by the same sharp clich‚s, the same jagged dangers that have threatened us! If the idea stands up, I thought, it would be worth uncovering the typewriter! How Richard-years-ago would have wanted to know: What happens when we set off searching for a soulmate who doesn't exist, and find her?" (Bridge 209) --Richard Bach ------------------------------------------ "We're different, we're the same. You thought you'd never find a word to say to a woman who didn't fly airplanes. I couldn't imagine myself spending time with a man who didn't love music. Could it be it's not as important to be alike as it is to be curious? Because we're different, we can have the fun of exchanging worlds, giving our loves and excitements to each other. You can learn music, I can learn flying. And that's only the beginning. I think it would go on for us as long as we live." (Bridge 169) --Richard Bach ------------------------------------------ "If we change in different directions, then we don't have any future anyway, do we? I think it's possible for two people to change together, to grow together and enrich instead of diminish each other. The sum of one and one, if they're the right ones, can be infinity! But so often one person drags the other down; one person wants to go up like a balloon and the other's a dead weight. I've always wondered what it would be like if both people, if a woman and a man both wanted to go up like balloons!" (Bridge 168) --Richard Bach ------------------------------------------ "That's what learning is, after all: not whether we lose the game, but how we lose and how we've changed because of it and what we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to other games. Losing, in a curious way, is winning." (Bridge 91) --Richard Bach ------------------------------------------ "Here's how the people live here, in big house-shaped boxes to keep off 'rain' and 'snow,' holes cut in the sides so they can see out. They move around in smaller boxes, painted different colours, with wheels on the corners. They need this box-culture because each person thinks of herself and himself as locked in a box called a 'body,' arms and legs, fingers to move pencils and tools, languages because they've forgotten how to communicate, eyes because they've forgotten how to see. Odd little planet. Wish you were here. Home soon." (Bridge 85-6) --Richard Bach ------------------------------------------ "Two things I do value a lot, intimacy and the capacity for joy, didn't seem to be on anyone else's list. I felt like the stranger in a strange land, and decided I'd better not marry the natives." (Bridge 76) --Richard Bach ------------------------------------------ "Other people think they know what you are: glamour, sex, money, power, love. It may be a press agent dream which has nothing to do with you, maybe it's something you don't even like, but that's what they think you are. People rush at you from all sides, they think they're going to get these things if they touch you. It's scary, so you build walls around yourself, thick glass walls while you're trying to think, trying to catch your breath. You know who you are inside, but people outside see something different. You can choose to become the image, and let go of who you are, or continue as you are and feel phony when you play the image." (Bridge 72) --Richard Bach ------------------------------------------ "There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they're necessary to reach the places we've chosen to go." (Bridge 56) --Richard Bach ------------------------------------------ "Part of us is always the observer, and no matter what, it observes. It watches us. It does not care if we are happy or unhappy, if we are sick or well, if we live or die. Its only job is to sit there on our shoulder and pass judgment on whether we are worthwhile human beings." (The Bridge Across Forever 43) --Richard Bach ------------------------------------------ "We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much. And still we long to feel." --Jeanette Winterson ------------------------------------------ "By the time the average person finishes college he or she will have taken over 2,600 tests, quizzes and exams. The 'right answer' approach becomes deeply ingrained in our thinking. This may be fine for some mathematical problems, where there is in fact only one right answer. The difficulty is that most of life isn't that way. Life is ambiguous; there are many right answers - all depending on what you are looking for. But if you think there is only one right answer, then you'll stop looking as soon as you find one." --Roger von Oech ------------------------------------------ "You say I have no power? Perhaps you speak truly... but you say that dreams have no power here? Tell me, Lucifer Morningstar... ask yourselves, all of you... what power would hell have if those here imprisoned were not able to dream of heaven?" --Neil Gaiman ------------------------------------------ "A friend is one before whom I may think aloud." --Ralph Waldo Emmerson ------------------------------------------ "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." --Friedrich Nietzsche ------------------------------------------ "If we keep doing what we're doing, we're going to keep getting what we're getting." --Stephen Covey ------------------------------------------ "It's hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head." --Sally Kempton ------------------------------------------ "We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought." --Bertrand Russell ------------------------------------------ "Happiness is not in our circumstance but in ourselves. It is not something we see, like a rainbow, or feel, like the heat of a fire. Happiness is something we are." --John B. Sheerin ------------------------------------------ "The self is not something that one finds, it is something that one creates." --Thomas Szasz ------------------------------------------ "It's better to be boldly decisive and risk being wrong than to agonize at length and be right too late." --Marilyn Moats Kennedy ------------------------------------------ "You'll never know if you can win until you know you've tried your best... and then it doesn't matter if you've won or not because you will have improved, and that is winning for yourself." --Carolyn Meroniuk ------------------------------------------ "There are threads that help you find your way back, and there are threads that intend to bring you back. Mind turns to pull, it's hard to pull away. I'm always thinking of going back. When Lot's wife looked over her shoulder, she turned into a pillar of salt. Pillars hold things up, and salt keeps things clean, but it's a poor exchange for losing your self. People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart, or kill your heart, or you can choose between the two realities. There is much pain here. Some people think you can have your cake and eat it. The cake goes mouldy and they choke on what's left. Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different." --Jeanette Winterson ------------------------------------------ "Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It's a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it's a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the way cats play. Claw it, chew it, rearrange it and at bedtime it's still a ball of string full of knots. Nobody should mind. Some people make a lot of money out of it. Publishers do well, people make a lot of money out of it. Publishers do well, children, when bright, can come top. It's an all-purpose rainy day pursuit, this reducing of stories called history." --Jeanette Winterson ------------------------------------------ "Since I was born I had assumed that the world ran on very simple lines, like a larger version of our church. Now I was finding that even the church was sometimes confused. This was a problem. But not one I chose to deal with for many years more. The problem there and then was what was going to happen to me. The Victoria Hospital was big and frightening, and I couldn't even sing to any effect because I couldn't hear what I was singing. There was nothing to read except some dental notices and an instruction leaflet for the X-ray machine. I tried to build an igloo out of the orange peel but it kept falling down and even when I stood up I didn't have an Eskimo to put in it, so I had to invent a story about 'How Eskimo Got Eaten', which made me even more miserable. It's always the same with diversions; you get involved." --Jeanette Winterson ------------------------------------------ "The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear." --Herbert Sebastian Agar ------------------------------------------ "I don't know because I don't think about it much in those terms. I don't think about what is the greatest thing that ever happened to me. It seems to me that things don't last long anyway. Your high points and your low points. High points don't last that long, it's a high and it happens. It's great at the moment but you really can't live on it. There's gotta be something higher - - and lower. But I have all kinds of ups and downs, highs and lows, I'm always chasing them." --Ric Ocasek ------------------------------------------ "There's only one opinion that counts. It's your opinion. It may be wrong, but it's yours and that's the one that counts." --Filipe Alou ------------------------------------------ "The best thing you can do for a song is to hear it on the radio and to imagine what it could mean to you and then kinda forget the words. Just imagine how you felt when you heard it, if it was one of your songs. If it became one of your songs. If it meant whatever it meant for you and as soon as you see the visual, you get a rapid eye movement relationship with the song instead of an imaginative one. I think that can be dangerous because I don't think I'd want to be listening to a song on the radio and thinking about the video. Whatever that one interpretation was." --Ric Ocasek ------------------------------------------ "Good and evil are not what our parents told us, not what our church tells us, or our country, not what anybody else tells us! All of us decide good and evil for ourselves, automatically, by choosing what we want to do!" (Running) --Richard Bach ------------------------------------------ "If we must lose wife or husband when we live to our highest right, we lose an unhappy marriage as well, and we gain ourselves. But if a marriage is born between two already self- discovered, what a lovely adventure begins, hurricanes and all!" (Running) --Richard Bach ------------------------------------------ "Life does not require us to be consistent, cruel, patient, helpful, angry, rational, thoughtless, loving, rash, open-minded, neurotic, careful, rigid, tolerant, wasteful, rich, downtrodden, gentle, sick, considerate, funny, stupid, healthy, greedy, beautiful, lazy, responsive, foolish, sharing, pressured, intimate, hedonistic, industrious, manipulative, insightful, capricious, wise, selfish, kind or sacrificed. Life does, however, require us to live with the consequences of our choices." (Running) --Richard Bach ------------------------------------------ "For a moment, off balance, was I annoyed? Anger is always fear, I thought, and fear is always fear of loss. Would I lose myself if he made those choices? It took a second to settle down: I'd lose nothing. They'd be his wishes, not mine, and he's free to live as he wants. The loss would come if I dared force him, tried to live for him and me as well. There'd be disaster worse than life on a bar stool." (Running from Safety) --Richard Bach ------------------------------------------ "Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun. When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself. I lifted my hand in wonderment and felt my cheeks, my neck. This was me. And when I had looked at myself and grown accustomed to who I was, I was not afraid to hate parts of me because I wanted to be worthy of the mirror bearer." (Passion) --Jeanette Winterson ------------------------------------------ "When I dream of a future in her arms no dark days appear, not even a head cold, and though I know it's nonsense I really believe we would always be happy and that our children would change the world." (Passion) --Jeanette Winterson ------------------------------------------ "I was happy but happy is an adult world. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not., Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher." (The Passion) --Jeanette Winterson ------------------------------------------ "They discovered that even in the face of pain that seems unbearable, even in the face of pain that wrings the last drop of blood out of your heart and leaves its scrimshaw tracery on the inside of your skull, life goes on. And pain grows dull, and begins to fade." (Lost Souls) --Poppy Z. Brite ------------------------------------------ "I can't heal your pain but I can see it. And you don't have to be lost. Not forever." (Lost Souls) --Poppy Z. Brite ------------------------------------------ "It is the colour of light, the shape of sound, high in the evergreens. It lies suspended in hills, a blue line in a red sky. I am looking at sound. I am hearing the brightness of high bluffs and almond trees. I am tasting the wilderness of lakes, rivers and streams, caught in an angle of sound. I am remembering water that glows in the dawn, the motion tumbled in earth, life hidden in mounds. I am dancing in a bright beam of light... I am remembering love." --from Love Jones ------------------------------------------ "Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever." (Atlas 735) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "The opening and middle game are vital but a player up two pieces might have a heart attack and have to forfeit. The end game is what counts." --Pablo Pedro Gomez ------------------------------------------ "The music of [his] Fifth Concerto streamed from his keyboard, past the glass of the window, and spread through the air, over the lights of the valley. It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean and left nothing buy the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, bu spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance." (Atlas 1072) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "Traditions exist so we can go beyond them." --Greg Hawkes ------------------------------------------ "The most important thing to a lot of people, is to belong to something that's hip or whatever. To be a part of something that's not society, just a clique. And they get real sidetracked trying to think like everyone else. They don't realize that you have to motivate yourself to do things you want to do. Some people just like going along for the ride. And those are the kind of people I don't get along with too well." --Ric Ocasek ------------------------------------------ "Once they're on paper, they're gone. I like to do as much with the words, as far as image goes, so that it's really left open for a lot of things, even though I remember a specific impression of something I had at the time. I can't say a song is about this or that; in fact, I wouldn't even want to. I just prefer to have people live it anyway they want. Because it's theirs after that. There's nothing I can do about it anymore." --Ric Ocasek ------------------------------------------ "To be under pressure is inescapable. Pressure takes place through all the world; war, siege, the worries of state. We all know men who grumble under these pressures and complain. They are cowards. They lack splendour. But there is another sort of man who is under the same pressure but does not complain, for it is the friction which polishes him. It is the pressure which refines and makes him noble." --St. Augustine ------------------------------------------ "It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat; who strives valiantly; who errs and may fail again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who does know the great enthusiasm, the great devotion; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat." --Theodore Roosevelt ------------------------------------------ "Through music I either tame my demons or unleash them and allow them to be what they are. I don't want the music to be about provocation, I want the music to bring you to a place where you feel at home." --Michael Franti ------------------------------------------ "You can't think of risks. I have nothing to lose. You either make something that you like, or you don't, and you throw it to the universe." --Mike Myers ------------------------------------------ "Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness." --Helen Keller ------------------------------------------ "Not the senses I have but what I do with them is my kingdom." --Helen Keller ------------------------------------------ "Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a while experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing." --Helen Keller ------------------------------------------ "People ignore the strange and unusual... I myself am strange and unusual." --from Beetlejuice ------------------------------------------ "When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares." --Henri Nouwen ------------------------------------------ "Do I avoid looking a stranger in the eyes because I don't want to make him uncomfortable, or do I turn my eyes so he can't look into me? What is in there that I don't want him to see?" (Notes) --Hugh Prather ------------------------------------------ "When someone disagrees with me, I do not have to immediately start revising what I just said. People don't want me to always agree with them. They can sense this is phony. They can sense I am trying to control them: I am agreeing with them to make them like me. They feel; 'I don't want to exist to like you. I DON'T exist to like you.'" (Notes) --Hugh Prather ------------------------------------------ "Sometimes when I generalize I am saying, 'Let's pretend I am God,' and of course the other person argues that point endlessly. But I notice that if the other person takes a stand for himself and states his thoughts as his thoughts, I pay more attention to what he is saying and look deeper in myself." (Notes) --Hugh Prather ------------------------------------------ "Within me is the potential to commit every evil act I see being committed by other men, and unless I feel this potential I can at any moment be controlled by these same urges. I am free from these urges only if I recognize when I am feeling them, and while feeling them and acknowledging them to be me, choose not to follow them. Only in this way can I begin to regain the disowned parts of me. And only in this way can I know what it is I am criticizing in others." (Notes) --Hugh Prather ------------------------------------------ "I sometimes react to making a mistake as if I have betrayed myself. My fear of making a mistake seems to be based on the hidden assumption that I am potentially perfect and that if I can just be very careful I will not fall from heaven. But a 'mistake' is a declaration of the way I am, a jolt to the way I intend, a reminder I am not dealing with the facts. When I have listened to my mistakes I have grown." (Notes) --Hugh Prather ------------------------------------------ "Perfectionism is a slow death. If everything were to just like I would want it to, just like I would plan for it to, then I would never experience anything new; my life would be an endless repetition of stale successes. When I make a mistake I experience something unexpected." (Notes) --Hugh Prather ------------------------------------------ "I can not 'make my mark' for all time -- those concepts are mutually exclusive. 'Lasting effect' is a self-contradictory term. Meaning does not exist in the future and neither do I. Nothing will have meaning 'ultimately.' Nothing will even mean tomorrow what it did today. Meaning changes with the context. My meaningfulness is here. It is enough that I am of value to someone today. It is enough that I make a difference now." (Notes to Myself) --Hugh Prather ------------------------------------------ "For some reason, when we're on tour all our dressing rooms have blackboards. So we chalk up New Laws of the Universe like, 'What is not there, will be,' and 'All roads lead to other roads.'" --Greg Hawkes ------------------------------------------ "Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are." --John Wooden ------------------------------------------ "Men of genius are admired, men of wealth are envied, men of power are feared; but only men of character are trusted." ------------------------------------------ "Dignity does not consist in possessing honours, but in deserving them." --Aristotle ------------------------------------------ "You're all very quiet for people running for their lives." --from Press Gang ------------------------------------------ "I laugh, my voice spiralling into Forever for I have found perfection and it has always been right here in the temple of Self" --Miranda Padgett ------------------------------------------ "People tend to think I'm always aggressive and strong. The truth is, I've always been wracked with self-loathing, which leads me into terrible, self paralysing depressions. When I go down to this place, I feel so empty and overwhelmed I can barely move. But perversely, I find these traits in a man unacceptable -- I can't stand someone who can out-depress me. You know that scene in Babe where the farmer clog-dances for the pig? Sometimes I'm the sick pig and I need a farmer to cheer me up. And when things get bad, my boyfriend does dance for me, and it never fails to make me laugh. He's a pretty snappy dancer." --Shirley Manson ------------------------------------------ "Remember, beneath every cynic there lies a romantic, and probably an injured one." --Glenn Beck ------------------------------------------ "Every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world is the triumph of enthusiasm. Nothing great was ever achieved without it." --Ralph Waldo Emerson ------------------------------------------ "If there were a mile high mountain of granite, and once every ten-thousand years a bird flew past and brushed it with a feather, by the time that mountain was worn away, a fraction of a second would have passed in the context of eternity." --Lois Duncan ------------------------------------------ "People. I knew some of them, but not now. On the moon, I wander among the many pot holes. Their shadows make me feel planet-stricken. Display model #1: Clusters of magnetic liquids. I would like to uncover the mystery of the scrim. Will I rise to the occasion when it decides to fall by? A tiny walled-off angel lays an egg. A secret life-the ruminations of a creature that walks without legs, eats without a mouth, breathes without lungs, feels without nerves, then divides and conquers. What happens when you try to squeeze a puddle of gravity in your hand? It dissolves into hundreds of silver eggs. Me too. The incubation period was over. Display model #2: People backed up into a dark corner. Unearthed puzzle, the same the moon all over. Next stage? Parachute, the final explanation arising as I make my slow descent." --Gillian McCain ------------------------------------------ "Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps." --Emo Phillips ------------------------------------------ "The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts." --Timothy Dwight ------------------------------------------ "Be happy. It is a way of being wise." --Colette ------------------------------------------ "Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of travelling." --M. L. Runbeck ------------------------------------------ "It is better to aim at perfection and miss, than to aim at imperfection and hit it." --T. J. Watson, Sr. ------------------------------------------ "Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers." --Lord Alfred Tennyson ------------------------------------------ "You are what you do when it counts." --The Masao ------------------------------------------ "I once complained to my father that I didn't seem to be able to do things the same way other people did. Dad's advice? 'Margo, don't be a sheep. People hate sheep. They eat sheep.'" --Margo Kaufmann ------------------------------------------ "If you're never scared or embarrassed or hurt, it means you never take any chances." --Julia Soorel ------------------------------------------ "Success is a journey, not a destination." --Ben Sweetland ------------------------------------------ "There is zero, and there is eternity, and there is mortality, but there is no ultimate." --Stephen King ------------------------------------------ "You are what you are -- and not what people think you are." --O. W. Polen ------------------------------------------ "Don't try to be different. Just be good. To be good is different enough." --Arthur Freed ------------------------------------------ "If we're going to be damned, let's be damned for who we really are!" --from Star Trek: The Next Generation ------------------------------------------ "I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." (Dune) --Frank Herbert ------------------------------------------ "About all you can do in life is be who you are. Some people will love you for you. Most will love you for what you can do for them, and some won't like you at all." --Rita Mae Brown ------------------------------------------ "The difficulties of life are intended to make us better, not bitter." --Mandie Ellingson ------------------------------------------ "An ordinary man can... surround himself with two thousand books... and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy." --Augustine Birrell ------------------------------------------ "Language exists to conceal true thought." --Tallyrand ------------------------------------------ "A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary." --Thomas Carruthers ------------------------------------------ "People who think honestly and deeply have a hostile attitude towards the public." --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ------------------------------------------ "The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth." --Niels Bohr ------------------------------------------ "Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now -- always." --Albert Schweitzer ------------------------------------------ "I can promise to be frank, I cannot promise to be impartial." --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ------------------------------------------ "If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you make them really think, they'll hate you." ------------------------------------------ "Two things fill my mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe: the starry skies above me and the moral law within me." --Immanuel Kant ------------------------------------------ "The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win you're still a rat." --Lilly Tomlin ------------------------------------------ "God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of his own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any other players, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won't tell you the rules and who smiles all the time." --Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett ------------------------------------------ "Okay, I'm sorry I don't write poems about sunsets and nature and mystical experiences, I only know what I know; I could write that the sight of a sunset lit up my mind like Light Brite and I was enlightened, or that the sun and moon are my mother and father; but I can't -- I can only write with any semblance of truth about what contains my simple frame of reference." --Gillian McCain ------------------------------------------ "All art must come from experience, or it is as fake as the soul of the one who writes it." --Loriel ------------------------------------------ "If you happen to meet a crocodile, don't stick your head in its mouth. Every now and then, and who knows the reason, people ignore this advice, which is sad because they die, but very stupid because they were warned. They had a choice. The moral of the story is this -- you can't afford to be stupid. There are crocodiles..." --from Press Gang ------------------------------------------ "The man who can drive himself further once the effort gets painful is the man who will win." --Roger Bannister ------------------------------------------ "Imagine a life without uncertainty... Imagine how dull life would be if variables assessed for admission to a professional school, graduate program, or executive training program really did predict with great accuracy who would succeed and who would fall. Life would be intolerable -- no hope, no challenge." --R. M. Dawes ------------------------------------------ "Go your own way. Question everything. Accept nothing. Accept no dogma, no can't. There are too many people walking around thinking they're sacred cows, and they're only half right." --Rosie Dimanno ------------------------------------------ "The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them." --Mark Twain ------------------------------------------ "Consider a man riding a bicycle. Whoever he is, we can say three things about him. We know he got on the bicycle and started to move. We know that at some point he will stop and get off. Most important of all, we know that if at any point between the beginning and the end of his journey he stops moving and does not get off the bicycle he will fall off it. That is a metaphor for the journey through life of any living thing, and I think of any society of living things." --William Golding ------------------------------------------ "Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the human state. If they are to be treated as anything but trivial exercises of the imagination. I suggest there is a simple test we can apply. ... We must forget the whole paraphernalia of social description, demonstration, expostulation, approbation, condemnation. We have to say to ourselves, 'How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?'" --William Golding ------------------------------------------ "We spent all night learning an important less. You can't judge a sewer by its manhole cover. No sir. People can be very different under the surface than they might seem. Quiet, mild- mannered souls might just turn out to be roaring lions of two- fisted cool. And roaring lions of two-fisted cool just might have some crippling lobster problems! Listen man, it's all crazy down there under the surface. A lost wallet could bite you in half. A bar of soap could save your life. Egad, a disgusting mound of muck just might have some very compelling ideas. Do you dig my ditch?" --from The Tick ------------------------------------------ "I think that you appreciate that there are extraordinary men and women, and extraordinary moments when history leaps forward on the backs of these individuals. That what can be imagined, can be achieved. That you must dare to dream, but that there is no substitute for perseverance and hard work, and team work, because no one gets there alone. And that while we commemorate the greatness of these events and the individuals who achieve them, we cannot forget the sacrifice of those who makes these achievements and leaps possible." --from The X-Files ------------------------------------------ "The fact is that liberty, in any true sense, is a concept that lies quite beyond the reach of the inferior man's mind. And no wonder, for genuine liberty demands of its votaries a quality he lacks completely, and that is courage. The man who loves it must be willing to fight for it; blood, said Jefferson, is its natural manure. Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means the capacity for doing without... the average man doesn't want to be free. He wants to be safe." --H. L. Mencken ------------------------------------------ "Again, we must ask ourselves why the people that brought war, plane crashes, political corruption, lap dancing and serial killers to our breakfast tables and into our living rooms are trying to sooth us with futuristic Web browsers, all buttons and spinning logos." --Michael Van Biesbrouck ------------------------------------------ "I wish that people would take the time to show people that they are important in their lives, either at work, or at home. Too many times people take others for granted, and I think that needs to change. People are so much nicer and willing to help you if you use those two little words that mean so much... 'Thank You!'" --Gina Gillespie ------------------------------------------ "I would wish that people come to realize that we create our own realities, and all our emotions and thoughts are simply choices. If we were more accountable as human beings we would experience far, far less suffering and indifference in the world. It is considerably easier to place blame outside of ourselves than to live life from an accountable position." --Robert Brincka ------------------------------------------ "I guess some people never change. Or, they quickly change and then quickly change back." --from The Simpsons ------------------------------------------ "There's an element of contempt for meanings. You want to write outside the usual framework. You want to dare readers to make a commitment you know they can't make. That's part of [crazed prose]. There's also the sense of drowning in information and in the mass awareness of things. Everybody seems to know everything. Subjects surface and are totally exhausted in a matter of days. ... The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren't arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, dear reader, if you went back to the living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don't really want to be here. This writer is working against the age and so he feels some satisfaction at not being widely read. He is diminished by an audience." --Don DeLillo ------------------------------------------ "Because friends have to be brutally honest with each other. I'd feel terrible if I didn't tell you what I was thinking, especially at a time like this." (Noise) --Don DeLillo ------------------------------------------ "We start our lives in chaos, in babble. As we surge up into the world, we try to devise a shape, a plan. There is dignity in this. Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram. It is a failed scheme but that's not the point. To plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control. Even after death, most particularly after death, the search continues. Burial rites are an attempt to complete the scheme, in ritual. Picture a state funeral. It is all precision, detail, order, design. The nation holds its breath. The efforts of a huge and powerful government are brought to bear on a ceremony that will shed the last trace of chaos. If all geos well, if they bring it off, some natural law of perfection is obeyed. The nation is delivered from anxiety, the deceased's life is redeemed, life itself is strengthened, reaffirmed." (Noise) --Don DeLillo ------------------------------------------ "Just because it's on the radio doesn't mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses." (White Noise) --Don DeLillo ------------------------------------------ "Where are the beginnings, the endings, and most important, the middles?" --Julio Cort zar ------------------------------------------ "He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder." --Albert Einstein ------------------------------------------ "That is the future, and it is probably nearer than we think. But our primary problem as universities is not engineering that future. We must rise above the obsession with quantity of information and speed of transmission, and recognize that the key issue for us is our ability to organize this information once it has been amassed -- to assimilate it, find meaning in it, and assure its survival for use by generations to come." --Vartan Gregorian ------------------------------------------ "The highest form of guitar soloing is saying something in 16 bars and not wasting a note. You can't aspire to anything finer in a pop record. I've never gone for gratuitous soloing. The most predictable thing in the world is to wank on guitar for days on end. It's like weight lifting. I'm not impressed by it." --Elliot Easton ------------------------------------------ "Little problems are big problems for little minds" --Tom Zimmerman ------------------------------------------ "Such is the stuff of waking nightmares, incipient madness, the sort of now-bewildered but soon-to-be-deranged thoughts that cause once well-balanced people to peek under their beds at night, suspect that their phones are tapped, and, in time, become certain that sinister forces are monitoring their every move. Maybe it's the government, maybe it's the Trilateral Commission, maybe it's the saucer people. You can't trust anyone because anyone and everyone may be one of Them or on of Their Agents. And pretty soon you begin writing long letters to the editor of Scientific American, or maybe you don't because the editors are probably part of the conspiracy too. And you think about lining your room with aluminum foil to keep the radio waves out, and at night you roam the streets spray-painting mystic symbols on the walls to repel strange forces, and all the while you gibber to yourself and what you say makes sense to you if to no one else, and in the end you put your belongings in a shopping bad, better to be mobile, and you look for a dark place you can hide during the daylight hours, because They are out there, and They are searching, and They want you in their crosshairs... The headshrinkers call it paranoia, and when it gets bad they put you away. Because, after all, people who think everyone in the world wants to kill them can be dangerous." --Joseph R. Garber ------------------------------------------ "I cannot feel good about being a woman unless you feel bad about being a moan. I cannot be proud of being black unless you are ashamed of being white. I cannot respect myself for being gay unless you are embarrassed that you are straight. Tolerance has been put by the boards; it is a stale and bitter thing and we will have none of it. Equality, likewise; is condescending at best and in truth intended to demean. If I am to achieve the inner harmony and self-respect that is my due, it will not suffice for you and I to be equals. No! Nothing less than superiority will make me happy. And to ensure that I make my point, I shall commend your libraries to the flames, rewrite your histories, purge your dictionaries, and arm the thought police with power to enforce political correctness in all speech and apprehension." --Joseph R. Garber ------------------------------------------ "I want you to be able to say anything. Even what you don't mean." (Notes to Myself) --Hugh Prather ------------------------------------------ "It's a pity if someone... has to console himself for the wreck of his days with the notion that somehow his voice, his work embodies the deepest, most obscure, freshest, rawest oyster of reality in the unfathomable refrigerator of the heart's ocean, but I am such a one, and there you have it. ... It is really amazing how famous I am to those few who truly comprehend what I'm about. I am the Voice of Suffering and I cannot be consoled." --Leonard Cohen ------------------------------------------ "Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way." --General George Patton ------------------------------------------ "Be willing to make decisions. That's the most important quality in a good leader. Don't fall victim to what I call the Ready- Aim-Aim-Aim Syndrome. You must be willing to fire." --T. Boone Pickens ------------------------------------------ "Hello everyone. I suppose you think that nothing much is happening at the moment. Well, that's what I want to talk to you all about; endings. Now, endings normally happen at the end. But as we all know, endings are just beginnings. You know, once these things really get started, it's jolly hard to stop them again. However, as we have all come this far, I think, under the circumstances the best solution is that we all just keep going. Let's keep this going in sight, never an ending. Let's remember that this world wants fresh beginnings. I feel here, in this country, and throughout the world, we are crying out for beginnings, beginnings. We never want to hear this word 'endings'. I know we all want to sit down. I know you want to take it easy. Of course we're looking for the good. Of course we're looking for the fresh start." --Mike Oldfield ------------------------------------------ "Whenever someone annoys me, I create a file with his or her name on it and drag it to my Mac's trash icon. If I'm really angry, I empty the trash, and whoever was bugging me disappears into the void." --Margo Kaufman ------------------------------------------ "'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean; neither more nor less.'" (Through the Looking-Glass 164) --Lewis Carroll ------------------------------------------ "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination." --John Keats ------------------------------------------ "To approach telepathy, you start with empathy and crank that up as high as you can. You care about each other. You feel each others's joy and pain. You make each other laugh, and help each other cry. You work hard at trusting each other, so that it's safe to dismantle the fortress around your ego. You forgive each other anything that stands between you, and try to bring out each other's best, you work very hard at hosing all the bull-shit out of your head so that it's clean enough for guests, silencing all the demons in your subconscious so that it's quiet enough to hear people thinking at you, and most of all you find ways to make that work so much fun that you keep on working. You stick together and love each other, and keep growing." --Spider Robinson ------------------------------------------ "You are what you do when it counts" --John Steakley ------------------------------------------ "I once listed all the good things I did over the past year, and then turned them into resolution form and backdated them. That was a good feeling." --Robert Fulghum ------------------------------------------ "The quality of a person's life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavour." --Vince Lombardi ------------------------------------------ "Create a vision and never let the environment, other people's beliefs, or the limits of what has been done in the past shape your decisions. Ignore conventional wisdom." --Anthony Robbins ------------------------------------------ "Determine what you want, then resolve to pay the price to get it." --Bunker Hunt ------------------------------------------ "For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin -- real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life." --Fr. Alfred D'Souza ------------------------------------------ "And as cliche as it may sound I'd like to raise another round And if you bottles empty Help yourself to mine Thank you for your time And here's to life." --The Refreshments ------------------------------------------ "And who ever said there's nothing new under the sun Never thought much about individuals But he's dead anyways." --The Refreshments ------------------------------------------ "All great truths begin as blasphemies." --George Bernard Shaw ------------------------------------------ "You see things and say, 'Why?', but I dream things and say, 'Why not?'" --George Bernard Shaw ------------------------------------------ "Truth is not determined by majority vote." --Doug Gwyn ------------------------------------------ "The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper." --Bertrand Russel ------------------------------------------ "It is not what they take away from you that counts. It's what you do with what you have left." --Hubert Humphrey ------------------------------------------ "People who fail to achieve their goals usually get stopped by frustration. They allow frustration to keep them from taking the necessary actions that would support them in achieving their desire. You get through this roadblock by plowing through frustration, taking each setback as feedback you can learn from, and pushing ahead. I doubt you'll find many successful people who have not experienced this. All successful people learn that success is buried on the other side of frustration." --Anthony Robbins ------------------------------------------ "If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn't lead anywhere." --Unkn ------------------------------------------ "This great misfortune -- to be incapable of solitude." --Jean de la Bruyere ------------------------------------------ "There is no such thing as a 'self-made' man. We are made up of thousands of others. Everyone who has ever done a kind deed for us, or spoken one word of encouragement to us, has entered into the make-up of our character and of our thoughts, as well as our success." --George Matthew Adams ------------------------------------------ "Our lives improve only when we take chances -- and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves." --Walter Anderson ------------------------------------------ "There are two types of people -- those who come into a room and say, 'Well, here I am!' and those who come in and say, 'Ah, there you are.'" --Frederick L Collins ------------------------------------------ "I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is to try to please everyone." --Bill Cosby ------------------------------------------ "There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self." --Aldous Huxley ------------------------------------------ "I take a simple view of life: keep your eyes open and get on with it." --Sir Laurence Olivier ------------------------------------------ "The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views... which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering." --from Doctor Who ------------------------------------------ "I'm old old enough to play baseball or football. I'm not eight yet. My Mom told me when you start baseball, you aren't going to be able to run that fast because you had an operation. I told Mom I wouldn't need to run fast. When I play baseball, I'll just hit them out of the park. Then I'll be able to walk." --Edward J. Mcgrath Jr. ------------------------------------------ "It's possible to fight intolerance, stupidity and fanaticism when they come separately. When you get all three together it's probably wiser to get out, if only to preserve your sanity." --P. D. James ------------------------------------------ "Is there a home, a home for me? Where the people stay until eternity? Is there a road that winds up, underneath the big green tree? Is there a home, a home for me?" --Stan Ridgway ------------------------------------------ "I wanna float with you on a cumulus cloud I wanna take you far away from this maddening crowd You can scratch up my back with your long fingernails We'll drink some weird wine and eat psychedelic snails." --Stan Ridgway ------------------------------------------ "My angel, my all, my very self... my thoughts go out to you, my Immortal Beloved, now and then joyfully, then sadly, waiting to learn whether or not fate will hear us -- I can live only wholly with you or not at all... Be calm -- love me -- today -- yesterday -- what tearful longings for you -- you -- you -- my life -- my all -- farewell. Oh continue to love -- never misjudge the most faithful heart of your beloved. Ever thine. Ever mine. Ever ours." --Ludwig van Beethoven ------------------------------------------ "All right, they're on our left, they're on our right, they're in front of us, they're behind us. They can't get away this time!" --General "Chesty" Puller ------------------------------------------ "An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind." --Mohandas Gandhi ------------------------------------------ "True morality consists, not in following the beaten track, but in finding out the true path for ourselves and in fearlessly following it." --Mohandas Gandhi ------------------------------------------ "You have no warning when your life's about to change. No clap of thunder. No sign. Maybe a premonition, a fear, but we're scared most of the time, aren't we? So how do you know when it means something? How do you know when you're just not being paranoid?" --from Homicide: Life on the Street ------------------------------------------ "He was polite to his elders, who disliked him. Whatever his elders told him to do, he did. They told him to look before he leaped, and he always looked before he leaped. They told him never to put off until the next day what he could do the day before, and he never did. He was told to honour his father and his mother, and he honoured his father and his mother. He was told that he should not kill, and he did not kill, until he got into the Army. Then he was told to kill, and he killed. He turned the other cheek on every occasion and always did unto others exactly as he would have had others do unto him. When he gave to charity, his left hand never knew what his right hand was doing. He never once took the name of the Lord his God in vain, committed adultery or coveted his neighbour's ass. In fact, he loved his neighbour and never even bore false witness against him. [His] elders disliked him because he was such a flagrant nonconformist." (Catch 22) --Joseph Heller ------------------------------------------ "Well, maybe it is true, maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it's to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?" (Catch 22) --Joseph Heller ------------------------------------------ "Practice random acts of independence and senseless acts of freedom." --Professor Zen ------------------------------------------ "Stand up for yourself. If you don't then why should I?" --Professor Zen ------------------------------------------ "I have a novel way to eliminate crime as we know it. Instead of passing sentences of a certain number of years, why don't we educate the inmates and not let them out until they have maintained at least a C average from a grade school to a high school curriculum. Do you know how many people we could actually keep in prison and for how long? Think about it..." --Professor Zen ------------------------------------------ "'You'll get over it...' It's the clich‚s that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life forever. You don't get over it because 'it' is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The articularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?" (Body) --Jeanette Winterson ------------------------------------------ "Yes we are [friends] and I do like to pass the day with you in serious and inconsequential chatter. I wouldn't mind washing up beside you, dusting beside you, reading the back half of the paper while you read the front. We are friends and I would miss you, do miss you and think of you very often. I don't want to lose this happy space where I have found someone who is smart and easy and doesn't bother to check her diary when we arrange to meet." (Body) --Jeanette Winterson ------------------------------------------ "Poor me. There's nothing so sweet as wallowing in it is there? Wallowing is sex for depressives." (Body) --Jeanette Winterson ------------------------------------------ "I was in the last spasms of an affair with a Dutch girl called Inge. She was a committed romantic and an anarcha-feminist. This was hard for her because it meant she couldn't blow up beautiful buildings. She knew the Eiffel Tower was a hideous symbol of phallic oppression but when ordered by her commander to detonate the lift so that no-one should unthinkingly scale an erection, her mind filled with young romantics gazing over Paris and opening aerograms that said Je t'aime." (Body) --Jeanette Winterson ------------------------------------------ "Make three wishes and they shall all come true. Make three hundred and I will honour every one." (Written on the Body) --Jeanette Winterson ------------------------------------------ "You will never find time for anything. If you want time you must make it." --Charles Buxton ------------------------------------------ "We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't, it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions." --Jessamyn West ------------------------------------------ "Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war....Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest." --C. S. Lewis ------------------------------------------ "My riches consist not in the extent of my possessions, but in the fewness of my wants." --J. Brotherton ------------------------------------------ "The purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an open one." --Malcom Forbes ------------------------------------------ "Our business in life is not to get ahead of others, but to get ahead of ourselves - to break our own records, to outstrip our yesterday by our today." --Stewart B. Johnson ------------------------------------------ "Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours." --Richard Bach ------------------------------------------ "Obviously, where art has it over life is in the matter of editing. Life can be seen to suffer from a drastic lack of editing. It stops too quick, or else it goes on too long. Worse, its pacing is erratic. Some chapters are little more than a few sentences in length, while others stretch into volumes. Life, for all its raw talent, has little sense of structure. It creates amazing textures, but it can't be counted on for snappy beginnings or good endings either. Indeed, in many cases no ending is provided at all. --Larry McMurtry ------------------------------------------ "There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking." --Theodore Rubin ------------------------------------------ "We must not allow other people's limited perceptions to define us." --Virginia Satir ------------------------------------------ "Whether they really believe in their brave new world, however, is ultimately beside the point. They're building it. And in the friction-free future, jacked into paradise, we'll have the 'liberty' of living (or rather, or buying the illusion of living), through the benevolent offices of a middleman as nearly omnipotent as god himself. Freedom? A more perfect captivity is difficult to imagine." --Mark Slouka ------------------------------------------ "The future is green and low tech. We'll watch aquariums, not TVs." --A. Pavletich ------------------------------------------ "We all are where we are because we want to be there." --from What Happened Was... ------------------------------------------ "The future lay sparkling ahead of us and we thought that we'd know each other forever." --from Sleepers ------------------------------------------ "The most important thing about a man is what he believes in the depth of his being. This is the thing that makes him what he is, the thing that organizes him and feeds him; the thing that keeps him going in the face of untoward circumstances; the thing that gives him resistance and drive." --Hugh Stevenson Tigner ------------------------------------------ "If you don't have solid beliefs you cannot build a stable life. Beliefs are like the foundation of a building, and they are the foundation to build your life upon." --Alfred A. Montapert ------------------------------------------ "What orbit of the planets has put you and me in this place, at this moment? Where time takes a breath, and we dance on the edge of our dreams?" --from a Millennia commercial ------------------------------------------ "You know one of the ways that movies are still better than playback? Because the music comes up, there's credits, and you always know when it's over." --from Strange Days ------------------------------------------ "There's more to light than the opposite of dark." --Ric Ocasek ------------------------------------------ "There's a new and virulent cultural virus ripping through the world... The symptoms of those infected include attacks of optimism, strong feelings of community, lower stress levels and outbreaks of pronoia -- the sneaking feeling that someone is conspiring behind their backs to help them." --Jules Marshall ------------------------------------------ "Machines will never be able to give the thinking process a model of thought itself, since machines are not mortal. What gives humans access to the symbolic domain of value and meaning is the fact that we die." --R‚gis Debray ------------------------------------------ "The task of thinking is based upon selection and weeding out; remembering everything is weirdly similar to forgetting everything. Most things that people do shouldn't be remembered. Maybe forgetting is good." --Gary Wolf ------------------------------------------ "May the best from your past be the worst of your future." --from The Long Kiss Goodnight ------------------------------------------ "When you discard arrogance, complexity, and a few other things that get in the way, sooner or later you will discover that simple, childlike, and mysterious secret known to those of the Uncarved Block: Life is Fun." --Benjamin Hoff ------------------------------------------ "I think that the most important thing to teach children in an environmentally conscious age is alternative views of nature. They must be shown how our interpretation of natural systems is often completely dependent not on what is there but on what kind of box we draw around the data. And if they are going to be smarter than their parents, then schoolchildren must think subversively about accepted wisdoms concerning natural systems." --Stephen Strauss ------------------------------------------ "Progress involves risks. You can't steal second with your foot on first." --Fred Wilcox ------------------------------------------ "Don't save a pitcher for tomorrow. Tomorrow it may rain." --Leo Durocher ------------------------------------------ "It's like most anything. If you want to be a loser, there's always a way to dwell on the negative. If you want to win, there's always a way to think positively." --Tony La Russa ------------------------------------------ "If you are content with yourself, you'll stop taking those little steps forward and begin taking big steps backward." --Greg Maddux ------------------------------------------ "Bury me above the clouds, all the way from here Take away the things I need, take away my fear Hide me in a hollow sound, happy ever more Everything I had to give, gave them long before." --Garbage ------------------------------------------ "Crashing silent, broken down, falling into night Who gave up and who gave in, I'll go without a fight Cut me down or cut me dead, cut me in or out Kiss me blind time after time, take away my doubt." --Garbage ------------------------------------------ "I bit my tongue and stood in line With not much to believe in I bought into what I was sold And ended up with nothing." --Garbage ------------------------------------------ "I only smile in the dark My only comfort is the night gone black I didn't accidentally tell you that I'm only happy when it rains." --Garbage ------------------------------------------ "A couple things about looking into a mirror: First off, you get to see anybody sneaking up behind you, second, it's two- dimensional and you don't get to see the whole of yourself, third, mirrors are flat and very often cold, fourth, when things get hot and intense, it's the mirror that steams up, not your eyes." --Greg Webster ------------------------------------------ "A couple months ago I noticed that I hadn't really laughed for a long time... That's come back quite well, I'm enjoying more things... I'd say that I've almost completely recovered from the past few years, still cynical, but not really bitter." --Greg Webster ------------------------------------------ "[Alan Berg's] memory haunts many people, even those who never heard him on the radio, because his death could be read as a message: Be cautious, be prudent, be bland, never push anybody, never say what you really think, offer yourself as a hostage to the weirdos even before they make the first move. These days, a lot of people are opposed to the newfound popularity of 'trash television,' and no doubt they are right, and the hosts of these shows are shameless controversy-mongers. But at least they are not intimidated. Of what use is freedom of speech to those who fear to offend?" --Roger Ebert ------------------------------------------ "The hottest places in hell are reserved for those, who in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality." --Dante Alighieri ------------------------------------------ "People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true." --George Santayana ------------------------------------------ "I would step in the way of a bullet if it were aimed at my husband. It is not self-sacrifice to die protecting that which you value: If the value is great enough, you do not care to exist without it. This applies to any alleged sacrifice for those one loves." --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "Baseball breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face fall alone. --A. Bartlett Giamatti ------------------------------------------ "It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are." --Jean Baudrillard ------------------------------------------ "Tomorrow isn't promised to any of us." --Kirby Puckett ------------------------------------------ "Happiness isn't a static thing; it's the quest for happiness that allows us to think we're happy, while we continue to search for more." --Greg Webster ------------------------------------------ "We can't all be Einstein (because we don't all play the violin). At the very least, we need a sort of street-smart science: the ability to recognize evidence, gather it, assess it, and act on it." --Judith Stone ------------------------------------------ "Over the last decade or so 'wars' have been proclaimed, in turn, on teen pregnancy, dropping out, drugs, and most recently violence. The trouble with such campaigns, though, is that they come too late, after the targeted problem has reached epidemic proportions and taken firm root in the lives of the young. They are crisis intervention, the equivalent of solving a problem by sending an ambulance to the rescue rather than giving an inoculation that would ward off the disease in the first place. Instead of more such 'wars,' what we need is to follow the logic of prevention, offering our children the skills for facing life that will increase their chances of avoiding any and all of these fates." --Daniel Goldman ------------------------------------------ "Functionless art is simply tolerated vandalism." --Type O Negative ------------------------------------------ "That, of course, is the devil's bargain of addiction: a short- term good feeling in exchange for the steady meltdown of one's life." --Daniel Goldman ------------------------------------------ "What we call human nature in actuality is human habit." --Jewel Kilcher ------------------------------------------ "Why go to a museum and look at paintings if you can paint your own painting. I mean, do things for yourself. I mean, do you have somebody come in a sleep with your wife for you? Do you pay somebody to eat your food for you? I mean, do things for yourself. That's what life's about. There's so many people doing things they hate, I mean you have people running the country who all they care about is keeping their jobs not doing their jobs. There's so little real love in any of the work that I see." --from What Happened Was... ------------------------------------------ "To look this way is to see. To see is to have vision. To have vision is to understand. To understand is to know. To know is to become. To become is to live fully. To live fully is to matter. And to matter is to become light. And to become light is to be loved. And to be loved is to burn. And to burn is to exist. Off and on." --Robert Fulghum ------------------------------------------ "If you notice phrases, ideas, and anecdotes that closely resemble those that appear elsewhere in my writing, it's not a matter of sloppy editing. I'm repeating myself. I'm reshuffling words in the hope that just once I might say something exactly right. And I'm still wrestling with dilemmas that are not easily resolved or easily dismissed. I run at them again and again because I am not finished with them. Any may never be. Work-in- progress on a life-in-progress is what my writing is about. And some progress in the work is enough to keep it going on." --Robert Fulghum ------------------------------------------ "You yourself are in an ecstatic state to such a point that you feel as though you almost don't exist. I've experienced this time and again. My hand seems devoid of myself, and I have nothing to do with what is happening. I just sit there watching in a state of awe and wonderment. And it just flows out by itself." --Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi ------------------------------------------ "Change is the only thing that you can expect." --Jaymi Wiley ------------------------------------------ "How can you worry about pleasing people [critics] and what they're going to think? How can you do anything creative if the whole thing is motivated by trying to please somebody else? To me, the whole idea of what I thought art, or music, or anything creative was about pleasing yourself and hoping that whatever you're creating will reach someone else who'll see it on that level. To worry about someone picking it apart and discussing it element for element, and trying to knock you down or weaken it in any way doesn't amount to anything but a waste of paper." --Elliot Easton ------------------------------------------ "They're caught where there's no way out or where you can't see out. What are you going to do about it? I don't have the answer. If I did there would be no insane asylums. But I see a lot of people, a lot of my friends in the same predicament. Many times in my life, I was there myself." --Ric Ocasek ------------------------------------------ "There is really nothing you must be. And there is nothing you must do. There is really nothing you must have. And there is nothing that you must know. There is really nothing you must become. However, it helps to understand that fire burns, and when it rains, the earth gets wet..." --Robert Fulghum ------------------------------------------ "Making a living and having a life are not the same thing. Making a living and making a life that's worthwhile are not the same thing. Living the good life and living a good life are not the same thing. A job title doesn't even come close to answering the question 'What do you do?'" --Robert Fulghum ------------------------------------------ "Even if there's no such thing as free will, we have to treat each other as if there were free will in order to live together in society. Because otherwise, every time somebody does something terrible, you can't punish him, because he can't help it, because his genes or his environment or God made him do it, and every time somebody does something good, you can't honour him because he was a puppet, too. If you think that everybody around you is a puppet why bother talking to them at all? Why even try to plan anything or create anything, since everything you plan or create or desire or dream of is just acting out the script your puppeteer built into you." --Orson Scott Card ------------------------------------------ "The priests say that God created our souls, and that just puts us under the control of another puppeteer. If God created our will, then he's responsible for every choice we make. God, our genes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code at an ancient terminal -- there's no way free will can ever exist if we as individuals are the result of some external cause." --Orson Scott Card ------------------------------------------ "Isn't it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another without trying to own each other? Or is that buried so deep in our genes that we can never get it out? Territoriality. My wife. My friend. My lover. My outrageous and annoying computer personality who's about to be shut off at the behest of a half- crazy girl with OCD on a planet that I never heard of and how will I live without [her] when she's gone?" --Orson Scott Card ------------------------------------------ "I have too many secrets. For all these years I've been a speaker for the dead, uncovering secrets and helping people to live in the light of truth. Now I no longer tell anyone half of what I know, because if I told the whole truth there would be fear, hatred, brutality, murder, war." --Orson Scott Card ------------------------------------------ "We're poor little lambs who've lost our way, Baa! Baa! Baa! We're little black sheep who've gone astray, Baa-aa-aa! Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree, Damned from here to Eternity, God ha' mercy on such as we, Baa! Yah! Bah!" --Rudyard Kipling ------------------------------------------ "A strange thing happened then. The Speaker agreed with her that she had made a mistake that night, and she knew when he said the words that it was true, that his judgement was correct. And yet she felt strangely healed, as if simply speaking her mistake were enough to purge some of the pain of it. For the first time, then, she caught a glimpse of what the power of speaking might be. It wasn't a matter of confession, penance, and absolution, like the priests offered. It was something else entirely. Telling the story of who she was, and then realizing that she was no longer the same person. That she had made a mistake, and the mistake had changed her, and now she would not make the mistake again because she had become someone else, someone less afraid, someone more compassionate." --Orson Scott Card ------------------------------------------ "How clever of me. I have found such a pathway into hell that I can never get back out." --Orson Scott Card ------------------------------------------ "But I hope that in the lives of [the characters], you will find stories worth holding in your memory, perhaps even in your heart. That's the transaction that counts more than best-seller lists, royalty statements, awards, or reviews. Because in the pages of this book, you and I will meet one-on-one, my mind and yours, and you will enter a world of my making and dwell there, not as a character that I control, but as a person with a mind of your own. You will make of my story what you need it to be, if you can. I hope my tale is true enough and flexible enough that you can make it into a world worth living in." --Orson Scott Card ------------------------------------------ "The danger that keeps me just a little frightened with every book I write, however, is that I'll overreach myself once too often and try to write a story that I'm just plain not talented or skilful enough to write. That's the dilemma every storyteller faces. It is painful to fail. But it is far sadder when a storyteller stops wanting to try." --Orson Scott Card ------------------------------------------ "Remember, you can think for yourself, or just surrender your mind. It's your call, but don't expect me to pay your bills if you decide to surrender." --Professor Zen ------------------------------------------ "You can walk as carefully as you want through a mine field; it is still a mine field. But it's also true that if you step up to the plate worrying that you're going to strike out, the odds are that you're going to strike out. Not doing a large ambitious work because you're convinced that Danger Lurks Around Every Corner, the old 'I might be dead this time next year,' is a waste of the Inner Radiance that found you. It's like life insurance. It's betting against yourself. It's blowing out your own flame before someone beats you to it." --Dave Sim ------------------------------------------ "I think the more rational explanation is that the excision of a five-to-six-foot leech from the surface of a human body means that that body is going to have more of its own blood in its own veins. Unless the leech finds another body, it is going to go hungry." --Dave Sim ------------------------------------------ "These are ideas. I could say that they just came to me, but it would be more accurate to say that I went to them. Ideas -- and new connections between ideas -- lead you away from commonly held perceptions of reality. Ideas lead you out here. Ideas lead you into the darkness." --Dave Sim ------------------------------------------ "Once a profound truth has been seen, it cannot be 'unseen'. There's no 'going back' to the person you were. Even if such a possibility did exist... why would you want to?" --Dave Sim ------------------------------------------ "The problem is maddening. The thing you seek is so close, you feel you could reach out and touch it. You feel it is your immutable destiny to do so. You have not come this far and at such a cost merely to turn around and go back. There is a solution. Of this you are certain. Now, no longer a game of mass, a game of destiny, it has become, instead a contest of wills. You focus on That Which You Seek as if your gaze alone might bring it closer or narrow the distance between you. Just as it feels as if your mind itself will explode from the strain..." --Dave Sim ------------------------------------------ "For the first time in your conscious memory; for the first time in fact, since your were a baby; a single tear, full and warm, rolled down your right cheek and you fell into a very deep and entirely dreamless slumber..." --Dave Sim ------------------------------------------ "A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage. Every day sends to their graves obscure men whom timidity prevented from making a first effort." --Sydney Smith ------------------------------------------ "All courage is a form of constancy. It is always himself that a coward abandons first. After this all other betrayals come." --Cormac McCarthy ------------------------------------------ "There is a theory of societal evolution that goes like this: Barbarians invent a new culture. A middle class emerges to manage and help perpetuate the culture. An aristocracy eventually develops out of the middle class and devotes their energies to making things comfortable for themselves. Finally, a new set of barbarians smash everything apart and destroy the status quo so that the process must start all over again." --Alan Cross ------------------------------------------ "The secret of the world is this: the world is entirely circular and you will go round and round endlessly, never finding what you want, unless you have found what you really want inside yourself. When you follow a star you know you will never reach that star; rather it will guide you to where you want to go. It's a reference point, not an end in itself, even though you seem to be following it. So it is with the world. It will only ever lead you back to yourself. The end of all your exploring will be to cease from exploration and know the place for the first time." --Jeanette Winterson ------------------------------------------ "Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice." --Allan Bloom ------------------------------------------ "Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the feelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms. The passions may rage furiously, like true heathens, as they are; and the desires may imagine all sorts of vain things: but judgement shall still have the last word in every argument, and the casting vote in every decision." --Charlotte Bronte ------------------------------------------ "People are governed with the head; kindness of heart is little use in chess." --Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort ------------------------------------------ "I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect." --Oscar Wilde ------------------------------------------ "And that's the real incentive, isn't it? It's not so much the fact that you get to bask in their God's love that's the selling point, it's that you avoid damnation. Think of it like Coke putting out an ad that says 'Snapple causes muscle spasms, Pepsi is infected with AIDS, and tap-water gives you cancer. So drink Coke. Not only do we taste good, we're the only alternative to pain and suffering.' It's actually a pretty good marketing tool. Humanity, by nature, is an ambivalent animal, given to fits of inertia, and we're more than likely to sit on our noncommittal behinds unless there's a bogeyman to chase us out of our chairs." --Greg Bulmash ------------------------------------------ "No, life may not be easy, it can be lonely. Full of people we think we know, but barely comprehend. Yet we must always remember: it's the challenges that define us best, and the obstacles that illuminate what we're truly capable of. We must welcome adversity and embrace struggle, and no matter what we get from life, never give less than 100 percent. Of course, at the end of every battle weary day, we fold ourselves into peaceful darkness and find comfort in those gentle words... good night." --from Profit ------------------------------------------ "I'm pretty good at inventing phrases -- you know, the sort of words that suddenly make you jump, almost as though you'd sat on a pin, they seem so new and exciting even though they're about something hypnopaedically obvious. But that doesn't seem enough. It's not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too." --Aldous Huxley ------------------------------------------ "I'm thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feeling that I've got something important to say and the power to say it -- only I don't know what it is, and I can't make any use of the power." --Aldous Huxley ------------------------------------------ "[They] like to pretend they live in a universe where there are no facts, everything is a matter of opinion, and all opinions are equally valid. And, of course, they do live in just such a universe. Unfortunately, it exists entirely inside their own poorly-stocked minds." --Dr. Rory Coker ------------------------------------------ "The notion of saving the planet has nothing to do with intellectual honesty or science. The fact is that the planet was here long before us and will be here long after us. The planet is running fine. What people are talking about is saving themselves and saving their middle-class lifestyles and saving their cash flow." --Lynn Margulis ------------------------------------------ "Welcome to prekindergarten! You will not die if you discover that there are more lines out there than just your own. In fact, you'll discover that you will have an advantage if you know more of them!" --Bernice Johnson Reagon ------------------------------------------ "This means that people must somehow get free of this incredible obsession -- generated by governments and the economy and the guilt around sex and pleasure -- that they must become workaholics. The workaholic fascination is an illusion and a trap that people fall into without even realizing it. What's needed is more time for inner work, less time for television; detachment from all the myths we're steeped in; and the discovery of a language that will create harmony between a man and a woman." --Margo Anand ------------------------------------------ "Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean." --Aldous Huxley ------------------------------------------ "We're like a real family. Opinionated, argumentative, holding grudges, challenging each other. We challenge each other to be better than we are. That kind of thing doesn't happen at barbecues, at ball games, it happens on the job we're supposed to do. On the case. Put down the murder. The work itself is the most important thing. What we do is important. We speak for those that can no longer speak for themselves. And you're not gonna ever find anything like that anywhere. Not in vice, and not patrolling the grounds at Disneyland." --from Homicide: Life on the Street ------------------------------------------ "When I tell any truth it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those who do." --William Blake ------------------------------------------ "There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them." --Jean Cocteau ------------------------------------------ "Mere longevity is a good thing for those who watch life from the sidelines. For those who play the game, an hour may be a year, a single day's work, an achievement for eternity." --Gabriel Heatter ------------------------------------------ "To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour." --William Blake ------------------------------------------ "Mock the devil, and he will flee from thee." --Bono ------------------------------------------ "I have discovered that this world is harsh, cruel and nasty enough without writing off entire classes of individuals on the basis of their colour or national origin. There are enough people in the world who can be judged on the basis of their actions that we don't need to judge others merely on the basis of their colour or nationality." --Robert Chase ------------------------------------------ "What [he] is apparently objecting to is that not everyone takes his beliefs seriously. Indeed, some don't seem to respect his beliefs at all, and actually poke fun at them. Well, I have news for [him]: that's the nature of a free society. Opinions don't necessarily merit respect; they must earn respect in the marketplace of ideas." --Jeffrey Shallit ------------------------------------------ "[He] seems to want it both ways: the freedom to hold and express beliefs, and immunity from criticism for those beliefs. This is the kind of attitude that leads inexorably to totalitarianism. It is to be decried, particularly in a university environment where the search for truth necessitates that no belief be treated as sacred or above scrutiny." --Jeffrey Shallit ------------------------------------------ "I think it would be nice if you could include a greater slant to the growing, happy side of your persona -- it wouldn't be too hard to assume (as I erroneously did at first) that you were a depression-racked, paranoid loony. Not so much from this issue, but as a general pattern from earlier issues. I've learnt, though. You're not paranoid." --Julian Barton ------------------------------------------ "If you follow me, I may lead you straight to hell, but if you trust me, I will lead you back out again." --Francesco Pfauth ------------------------------------------ "We ran out of new ideas somewhere around 1978, since then we've been repeating ourselves. Same songs, same movies, same clothes, even the same crimes. Like this Robie guy, no imagination. He's just part of the rhythm and the rhyme of all this repeating. This is 1996, here comes the millennium. But people are nervous, they're on edge, they're jumpy. This is supposed to be something new. But we can't look that in the face, can we? So what do we do? We grab a little something from one year in the fifties and a little of something else from some other year, maybe late sixties. We think we're creating something new and different, but really, all we're doing is just repeating the same old... nothing. We're all copycats." --from Homicide: Life on the Street ------------------------------------------ "To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded." --Ralph Waldo Emerson ------------------------------------------ "No one beneath you can offend you. No one your equal would." --Jan L. Wells ------------------------------------------ "The road to truth is long, and lined the entire way with annoying bastards." --Alexander Jablokov ------------------------------------------ "We're here for a good time, not a long time So have a good time, the sun can't rise everyday." --Trooper ------------------------------------------ "Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness." --George Santayana ------------------------------------------ "Ignorance is not bliss -- it is oblivion." --Philip Wylie ------------------------------------------ "An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise." --Victor Hugo ------------------------------------------ "Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help you create the fact." --William James ------------------------------------------ "Maybe it was mean, but I really don't think so. You asked for the truth and I told you." --Sinead O'Connor ------------------------------------------ "What a wonderful day we've had. You have learned something and, I have learned something. Too bad we didn't learn it sooner. We could have gone to the movies instead." --from Perfect Strangers ------------------------------------------ "Minds are for people who think." --Madman Murdoch ------------------------------------------ "Since a rational man's ambition is unlimited, since his pursuit and achievement of values is a lifelong process -- and the higher the values, the harder the struggle -- he needs a moment, an hour or some period of time in which he can experience the sense of his completed task, the sense of living in a universe where his values have been successfully achieved. It is like a moment of rest, a moment to gain fuel to move farther." (Anthem) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "Many words have been granted me, and some are wise and some are false, but only three are holy: 'I will it!'" (Anthem) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "I know not if this earth on which I stand is the core of the universe or if it is but a speck of dust lost in eternity. I know not and I care not. For I know what happiness is possible to me on earth. And my happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose." (Anthem) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds. I am not a sacrifice on their altars." (Anthem) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "I think one thing we went through was common to a lot of people: You work your whole life to achieve something, then you achieve it and find out that you still have good days and bad days. So you start thinking, 'Is that all there is?' After a while you calm down and get back to work." --Elliot Easton ------------------------------------------ "If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live." --Martin Luther King, Jr. ------------------------------------------ "Who would fare better in this world of fitful time? Those who have seen the future and live only one life? Or those who have not seen the future and wait to live life? Or those who deny the future and live two lives?" --Alan Lightman ------------------------------------------ "Most people have learned to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. ... It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning." --Alan Lightman ------------------------------------------ "Some make light of decisions, arguing that all possible decisions will occur. In such a world, how could one be responsible for his actions? Others hold that each decision must be considered and committed to, that without commitment there is chaos. Such people are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each." --Alan Lightman ------------------------------------------ "The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy." --Richard Bach ------------------------------------------ "The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof." --Richard Bach ------------------------------------------ "We believed -- and I personally still believe -- that the so called Voice of God narration, ubiquitous in documentaries destined for PBS, is insulting to the audience. If you believe in the intelligence of your audience, you don't need to tell them what to think and how to process the material they're seeing." --Jayne Loader ------------------------------------------ "I was accused of every monstrous vice by public rumour and private rancour; my name, which had been a knightly or noble one, was tainted. I felt that, if what was whispered, and muttered, and murmured, was true, I was unfit for England; if false, England was unfit for me." --Lord Byron ------------------------------------------ "When indignation takes possession of his mind -- and it is easily excited -- his disposition becomes malevolent. He hates with the bitterest contempt. But as soon as he has indulged those feelings, he regains the humanity which he had lost -- from the immediate impulse of provocation -- and repents deeply. So that his mind is continually making the most sudden transitions - - from good to evil, from evil to good. A state of such perpetual tumult must be attended with the misery of restless inconsistency. He laments his want of tranquillity and speaks of the power of application to composing studies, as a blessing placed beyond his attainment, which he regrets." --Annabella Milbanke ------------------------------------------ "You sit around watching all this stuff happen on TV... and the TV sits and watches us do nothing! The TV must think we're all pretty lame." --Shannon Wheeler ------------------------------------------ "I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or and eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?" --Lord Byron ------------------------------------------ "Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and seemingly, that of the wildest odes, [has] a logic of its own as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more and more fugitive causes. In the truly great poets... there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word." --Samuel Taylor Coleridge ------------------------------------------ "[His mind] was like a volcano, full of fire and wealth, sometimes calm, often dazzling and playful, but ever threatening. It ran swift as the lightning from one subject to another, and occasionally burst forth in passionate throes of intellect, nearly allied to madness." --Lady Blessington ------------------------------------------ "They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their grey visions they obtain glimpses of eternity..." --Edgar Allan Poe ------------------------------------------ "I see at last that all the knowledge I wrung from the darkness -- that darkness flung me -- Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness And we call it wisdom. It is pain." --Randall Jarrell ------------------------------------------ "Is getting well ever an art, or art a way to get well?" ----Robert Lowell ------------------------------------------ "Writing is a form of therapy. Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation." --Graham Greene ------------------------------------------ "... You don't like my 'restless' doctrines -- I should be very sorry if you did -- but I can't stagnate nevertheless -- if I must said let it be on the ocean no matter how stormy -- anything but a dull cruise on a level lake without ever losing sight of the same insipid shores by which it is surrounded." --Lord Byron ------------------------------------------ "I had hit a critical period in my life, where I changed very much as a person. I consider the person I used to be, dead, and I'm glad that he is. Insecure, frightened, confused, much like a lot of people I know today." --Peter Steele ------------------------------------------ "I always think the same thing when I read about someone committing suicide. I think, 'There, but for the grace of God, go I.' I think, 'There's only a twist of Fate between me and them.' I think, 'It could have been me.' I think, 'I hope that I can give someone else a reason to live through today so that he or she will give me a reason to live through tomorrow.'" --Dahven White ------------------------------------------ "Opinion is a denial of truth. For if each man is entitled to his own opinion then there can be nothing which is false, consequently there can be nothing which is true." --Andrew Juric ------------------------------------------ "Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A Beauty Bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the air -- explode softly -- and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth -- boxes of Crayolas. And we wouldn't go cheap, either -- not little boxes of eight. Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in. With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest. And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination." --Robert Fulghum ------------------------------------------ "Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such." --Henry Miller ------------------------------------------ "The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself." --Archibald MacLeish ------------------------------------------ "It is remarkable how much mediocrity we live with, surrounding ourselves with daily reminders that the average is acceptable. Our world suffers from terminal normality. Take a moment to assess all of the things around you that promote your being 'average'. These are the things that keep you powerless to go beyond a 'limit' you arbitrarily set for yourself. The first step to having what your really want is the removal of everything in your environment that represents mediocrity, removing those things that are limiting. One way is to surround yourself with friends who ask more of you than you do." --Stewart Emery ------------------------------------------ "I am speaking to those among you who have retained some sovereign shred of their soul, unsold and unstamped: '-- to the order of others'. If, in the chaos of the motives that have made you listen to the radio tonight, there was an honest, rational desire to learn what is wrong with the world, you are the man whom I wished to address. By the rules and terms of my code, one owes a rational statement to those whom it does concern and who are making an effort to know. Those who are making an effort to fail to understand me, are not a concern of mine." (Atlas 981) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "Just as I support my life, neither by robbery nor alms, but by my own effort, so I do not seek to derive my happiness from the injury or the favour others of , but earn it by my own achievement. Just as I do not consider the pleasure of others as the goal of my life, so I do not consider my pleasure as the goal of the lives of others. Just as there are no contradictions in my values and no conflicts among my desires -- so there are no victims and no conflicts of interest among rational men, men who do not desire the unearned and do not view one another with a cannibal's lust, men who neither make sacrifice nor accept them." --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud -- that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the enemies you have to dread and flee -- that you do not care to live as a dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidity of others, or as a fool whose source of values is the fools he succeeds in fooling -- that honesty is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others." (Atlas 937) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists -- and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these. To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason -- Purpose -- Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge -- Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve -- Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worth of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man's virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride." (Atlas 936) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "You who prattle that morality is social and that man would need no morality on a desert island -- it is on a desert island that he would need it most. Let him try to claim, when there are no victims to pay for it, that a rock is a house, that sand is clothing, that food will drop into his mouth without cause or effort, that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring his stock seed today -- and reality will wipe him out, as he deserves; reality will show him that life is a value to be bought and that thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it." (Atlas 936) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest -- but if devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking." (Atlas 935) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you can deal. It is only your own knowledge that you can claim to possess or ask others to consider. Your mind is your only judge of truth -- and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but a man's mind can perform that complex, delicate, crucial process of identification which is thinking. Nothing can direct the process but his own judgement. Nothing can direct his judgement but his moral integrity." (Atlas 935) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live." (Atlas 932) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbours -- between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it." (Atlas 930) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "The lust that drives others to enslave an empire, had become, in her limits, a passion for power over him. She had set out to break him, as if, unable to equal his value, she could surpass it by destroying it, as if the measure of his greatness would thus become the measure of hers, as if the vandal who smashed a statue were greater than the artist who had made it, as if the murderer who killed a child were greater than the mother who had given it birth." --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "It's not that I don't suffer, it's that I know the unimportance of suffering, I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of existence. Don't feel sorry for me. It was gone right then." (Atlas 883) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "Yes... Yes, I feel that there's no chance for me to exist, if they do... no chance, no room, no world I can cope with... I don't want to feel it, I keep pushing it back, but it's coming closer and I know I have no place to run... I can't explain what it feels like, I can't catch hold of it -- and that's path of the terror, that you can't catch hold of anything -- it's as if the whole world were suddenly destroyed, but not by an explosion -- an explosion is something hard and solid -- but destroyed by ... by some horrible kind of softening ... as if nothing were solid, nothing held any shape at all, and you could poke your finger through stone walls and the stone would give, like jelly, and mountains would slither, and buildings would switch their shapes like clouds -- and that would be the end of the world, not fire and brimstone, but goo." (Atlas 819) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "Whenever anyone accuses some person of being 'unfeeling,' he means that that person is just. He means that that person has no causeless emotions and will not grant him a feeling which he does not deserve. He means that 'to feel' is to go against reason, against moral values, against reality." (Atlas 818) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "My pride and my power of vision were all that I owned when I started -- and whatever I achieved, was achieved by means of them. Both are greater now. Now I have the knowledge of the superlative value I had missed: of my right to be proud of my vision. The rest is mine to reach." (Atlas 793) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "Everything matters!" --from S.F.W. ------------------------------------------ "You'll come back, because yours is an error of knowledge, not a moral failure, not an act of surrender to evil, but only the last act of being victim to your own virtue. We'll wait for you and when you come back, you will have discovered that there need never be any conflict among your desires, nor so tragic a clash of values as the one you've borne so well." (Atlas 744) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "If you want to know the one reason that's taking me back, I'll tell you: I cannot bring myself to abandon to destruction all the greatness of the world, all that which was mine and yours, which was made by us and is still ours by right -- because I cannot believe that men refuse to see, that they can remain blind and deaf to us forever, when the truth is ours and their lives depend on accepting it. ... So long as men desire to live, I cannot lose my battle." (Atlas 744) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "Don't consider our interests or desires. You have no duty to anyone but yourself." (Atlas 740) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "Don't rely on our knowledge of what's best for your future. We do know, but it can't be best until you know it." (Atlas 740) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "Consider the reasons which make us certain that we are right, but not the fact that we are certain. If you are not convinced, ignore our certainty. Don't be tempted to substitute our judgement for your own." (Atlas 740) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "If any part of your uncertainty, is a conflict between your heart and your mind -- follow your mind." (Atlas 740) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "Did it ever occur to you, that there is no conflict of interests among men, neither in business nor in trade nor in their most personal desires -- if they omit the irrational from their view of the possible and destruction from their view of the practical? There is no conflict, and no call for sacrifice, and no man is a threat to the aims of another -- if men understand that reality is an absolute not to be faked, that lies do not work, that the unearned cannot be had, that the undeserved cannot be given, that the destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't." (Atlas 736) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence -- by his own choice." (Atlas 729) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "I want you to observe, that those who cry the loudest about their disillusionment, about the failure of virtue, the futility of reason, the impotence of logic -- are those who have achieved the full, exact, logical result of the ideas they preached, so mercilessly logical that they dare not identify it. In a world that proclaims the non-existence of the mind, the moral righteousness of rule by brute force, the penalizing of the competent in favour of the incompetent, the sacrifice of the best to the worst -- in such a world, the best have to turn against society and have to become it's deadliest enemies." (Atlas 729) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "What I want you to understand, is the full evil of those who claim to have become convinced that this earth, by its nature, is a realm of malevolence where the good has no chance to win. Let them check their premises. Let them check their standards of value. Let them check -- before they grant themselves the unspeakable license of evil-as-necessity -- whether they know what is the good and what are the conditions it requires." (Atlas 729) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "I sat there beside him till morning -- and as I watched his face in the starlight, then the first ray of the sun on his untroubled forehead and closed eyelids, what I experienced was not a prayer, I do not pray, but that state of spirit at which a prayer is a misguided attempt: a full, confident, affirming self-dedication to my love of the right, to the certainty that the right would win and that this boy would have the kind of future he deserved. ... I did not expect it to be as great as this -- or as hard." (Atlas 727) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "She can live through it, because we do not hold the belief that this earth is a realm of misery where man is doomed to destruction. We do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and we do not live in chronic dread of disaster. We do not expect disaster until we have specific reason to expect it -- and when we encounter it, we are free to fight it. It is not happiness, but suffering that we consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that we regard as the abnormal exception in human life." (Atlas 700) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "Why should this seem so startling? There is only one kind of men who have never been on strike in human history. Every other kind and class have stopped, when they so wished, and have presented demands to the world, claiming to be indispensable -- except the men who have carried the world on their shoulders, have kept it alive, have endured torture as sole payment, but have never walked out on the human race. Well, their turn has come. Let the world discover who they are, what they do and what happens when they refuse to function. This is the strike of the men of the mind. This is the mind on strike." (Atlas 681) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "God help us, ma'am! Do you see what we saw? We saw that we'd been given a law to live by, a moral law, they called it, which punished those who observed it -- for observing it. The more you tried to live up to it, the more you suffered; the more you cheated it, the bigger reward you got. Your honesty was like a tool left at the mercy of the next man's dishonesty. The honest ones paid, the dishonest collected. The honest lost, the dishonest won. How long could men stay good under this sort of a law of goodness?" (Atlas 613) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "A painting is never finished -- it simply stops in interesting places." --Paul Gardner ------------------------------------------ "I wish I could take language And fold it like cool, moist rags. I would lay words on your forehead. I would wrap words on your wrists. 'There, there,' my words would say -- Or something better. I would ask them to murmur, 'Hush' and 'Shh, shhh, it's all right.' I would ask them to hold you all night. I wish I could take language And daub and soothe and cool Where fever blisters and burns, Where fever turns yourself against you. I wish I could take language And heal the words that were the wounds You have no names for." --Julia Cameron ------------------------------------------ "Growth is a spiral process, doubling back on itself, reassessing and regrouping." --Julia Cameron ------------------------------------------ "One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time." --Andr‚ Gide ------------------------------------------ "The clock is ticking and you're hearing the beat. You stop by a museum shop, sign your name on a scuba-diving sheet, and commit yourself to Saturday mornings in the deep end. You're either losing your mind -- or gaining your soul. Life is meant to be an artist date. That's why we were created." --Julia Cameron ------------------------------------------ "I finally realized that it wasn't Starfleet that I was trying to get away from. I was trying to escape the pain I felt, after my wife's death. I thought I could take the uniform, wrap it around the pain and toss them both away. But it doesn't work like that. Running may help for a little while, but sooner or later the pain catches up with you, and the only way to get rid of it is to stand your ground." --from Deep Space Nine ------------------------------------------ "It is said that [Robin Hood] fought against the looting rulers and returned the loot to those who had been robbed, but that is not the meaning of the legend which has survived. He is remembered, not as a champion of property, but as a champion of need, not as a defender of the robbed, but as a provider of the poor. He is held to be the first man who assumed a halo of virtue by practising charity with wealth which he did not own, by giving away goods which he had not produced, by making others pay for the luxury of his pity. He is the man who became the symbol of the idea that need, not achievement, is the source of rights, that we don't have to produce, only to want, that the earned does not belong to us, but the unearned does. He became a justification for every mediocrity who, unable to make his own living, had demanded the power to dispose of the property of his betters, by proclaiming his willingness to devote his life to his inferiors at the price of robbing his superiors." (Atlas 534) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains and he withdrew his fire -- until the day when men withdraw their vultures." (Atlas 480) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "[He] stood motionless, not turning to the crowd, barely hearing the applause. He stood looking at the judges. There was no triumph in his face, no elation, only the still intensity of contemplating a vision with a bitter wonder that was almost fear. He was seeing the enormity of the smallness of the enemy who was destroying the devastation, past the ruins of great factories, the wrecks of powerful engines, the bodies of invincible men, he had come upon the despoiler, expecting to find a giant -- and had found a rat eager to scurry for cover at the first sound of a human step. If this is what has beaten us, he thought, the guilt is ours." (Atlas 449) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "I could say to you that I have done more good for my fellow man than you can ever hope to accomplish -- but I will not say it, because I do not seek the good of others as a sanction for my right to exist, nor do I recognize the good of others as a justification for their seizure of my property or their destruction of my life. I will not say that the good of others was the purpose of my work -- my own good was my purpose, and I despise the man who surrenders his. I could say to you that you do not serve the public good -- that nobody's good can be achieved at the price of human sacrifices -- that when you violate the rights of one man, you have violated the rights of all, and a public of rightless creatures is doomed to destruction. I could say that you that you will and can achieve nothing but universal devastation -- as any looter must, when he runs out of victims. I could say it, but I won't. It is not your particular policy that I challenge, but your moral premise." (Atlas 447) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "I am rich and proud of every penny I own. I made my money by my own effort, in free exchange and through the voluntary consent of every man I dealt with -- the voluntary consent of those who employed me when I started, the voluntary consent of those who work for me now, the voluntary consent of those who buy my product. I shall answer all the questions you are afraid to ask me openly. Do I wish to pay my workers more than their services are worth to me? I do not. Do I wish to sell my product for less than my customers are willing to pay me? I do not. Do I wish to sell it at a loss or give it away? I do not. If this is evil, do whatever you please about me, according to whatever standards you hold. These are mine. I am earning my own living, as every honest man must. I refuse to accept as guilt the fact of my own existence and the fact that I must work in order to support it. I refuse to accept as guilt the fact that I am able to do it and do it well. I refuse to accept as guilt the fact that I am able to do it better than most people -- the fact that my work is of greater value than the work of my neighbours and that more men are willing to pay me. I refuse to apologize for my ability -- I refuse to apologize for my success -- I refuse to apologize for my money." (Atlas 446-7) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "Did you ask me to name man's motive power? Man's motive power is his moral code. Ask yourself where their code is leading you and what it offers you as your final goal. A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue. A viler evil than to throw a man into a sacrificial furnace, is to demand that he leap in, of his own will, and that he build the furnace, besides. By their own statement, it is they who need you and have nothing to offer you in return. By their own statement, you must support them because they cannot survive without you. Consider the obscenity of offering their impotence and their need -- their need of you -- as a justification for your torture. Are you willing to accept it? Do you care to purchase -- at the price of your great endurance, at the price of you agony -- the satisfaction of the needs of your own destroyers?" (Atlas 423-4) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "All your life, you have heard yourself denounced; not for your faults, but for your greatest virtues. You have been hated, not for your mistakes, but for your achievements. You have been scorned for all those qualities of character which are your highest pride. You have been called selfish for the courage of acting on your own judgement and bearing sole responsibility for your own life. You have been called arrogant for your independent mind. You have been called cruel for your unyielding integrity. You have been called anti-social for the vision that made you venture upon undiscovered roads. You have been called ruthless for the strength and self-discipline of your drive to your purpose. You have been called greedy for the magnificence of your power to create wealth. You, who've expended an inconceivable flow of energy, have been called a parasite. You, who've created abundance where there had been nothing but wastelands and helpless, starving men before you, have been called a robber. You, who've kept them all alive, have been called an exploiter. You, the purest and most moral man among them, have been sneered at as a 'vulgar materialist.' Have you stopped to ask them: by what right? -- by what code? -- by what standard?" (Atlas 422-3) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "Did you really think that we wanted those laws to be observed? ... We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against -- then you'll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted -- and you create a nation of law-breakers -- and then you case in on guilt. Now that's the system, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with." (Atlas 406) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "That woman and all those like her keep evading the thoughts which they know to be good. You keep pushing out of your mind the thoughts which you believe to be evil. They do it, because they want to avoid effort. You do it, because you won't permit yourself to consider anything that would spare you. They indulge their emotions at any cost. You sacrifice your emotions as the first cost of any problem. They are willing to bear nothing. You are willing to bear anything. They keep evading responsibility. You keep assuming it. But don't you see that the essential error is the same? Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences. There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think. Don't ignore your own desires. Don't sacrifice them. Examine their cause. There is a limit to how much you should have to bear." (Atlas 389) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know its nature. To love money is to known and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money -- and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it." (Atlas 384) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers your scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?" (Atlas 384) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth -- the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?" (Atlas 384) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the mad who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made -- before it can be looted or mooched -- made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced." (Atlas 383) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "I think it's funny. There was a time when men were afraid that somebody would reveal some secret of theirs that was unknown to their fellows. Nowadays, they're afraid that somebody will name what everybody knows. Have you practical people ever though that that's all it would take to blast your whole, big, complex structure, with all your laws and guns -- just somebody naming the exact nature of what you're doing?" (Atlas 379) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "No longer conscious of my movement, I discovered a new unity with nature. I had found a new source of power and beauty, a source I never dreamt existed." --Roger Bannister ------------------------------------------ "What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough." --EugŠne Delacroix ------------------------------------------ "It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it." --W. Somerset Maugham ------------------------------------------ "He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened." --Lao-tzu ------------------------------------------ "Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things." --Edgar Degas ------------------------------------------ "The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth." --Adrienne Rich ------------------------------------------ "Truly, it is in the darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us." --Meister Eckhart ------------------------------------------ "Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment." --Jalal ud-Din Rumi ------------------------------------------ "When we are really honest with ourselves we must admit our lives are all that really belong to us. So it is how we use our lives that determines the kind of men we are." --Cesar Chavez ------------------------------------------ "In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity." --Albert Einstein ------------------------------------------ "Who was it that said he needed a fulcrum? Give me an unobstructed right-of-way and I'll show them how to move the earth!" (Atlas 234) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "The men of the press, who despised their own profession, did not know why they were enjoying it today. One of them, a young man with years of notorious success behind him and a cynical look of twice his age, said suddenly, 'I know what I'd like to be: I wish I could be a man who covers news!'" (Atlas 223) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "She looked at the crowd and she felt, simultaneously, astonishment that they should stare at her, when this event was so personally her own that no communication about it was possible, and a sense of fitness that they should be here, that they should want to see it, because the sight of an achievement was the greatest gift a human being could offer to others." (Atlas 222) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "... there's nothing of any importance in life -- except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value. All the codes of ethics they'll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard." (Atlas 98) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "[What for] was the first question he asked about any activity proposed to him -- and nothing would make him act, if he found no valid answer. He flew through the days of his summer month like a rocket, but if one stopped him in midflight, he could always name the purpose of his every random moment. Two things were impossible to him: to stand still or to move aimlessly." (Atlas 92-3) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "Francisco could do anything he undertook, he could do it better than anyone else, and he did it without effort. There was no boasting in his manner and consciousness, no thought of comparison. His attitude was not: 'I can do it better than you,' but simply: 'I can do it.' What he meant by doing was doing superlatively." (Atlas 92) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "If that's the price of getting together, then I'll be damned if I want to live on the same earth with any human beings! If the rest of them can survive only be destroying us, then why should we wish them to survive? Nothing can make self-immolation proper. Nothing can give them the right to turn men into sacrificial animals. Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best. One can't be punished for being good. One can't be penalized for ability. If that is right, then we'd better start slaughtering one another, because there isn't any right at all in the world!" (Atlas 79) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "It was his Fourth Concerto, the last work he had written. The crash of its opening chords swept the sights of the streets away from her mind. The Concerto was a great cry of rebellion. It was a 'NO' flung at some vast process of torture, a denial of suffering, a denial that held the agony of the struggle to break free. The sounds were like a voice saying: There is no necessity for pain -- why, then, is the worst pain reserved for those who will not accept its necessity? -- we who hold the love and the secret of joy, to what punishment have we been sentenced for it, and by whom? ... The sounds of torture became defiance, the statement of agony became a hymn to a distant vision for whose sake anything was worth enduring, even this. It was the song of rebellion -- and of a desperate quest." (Atlas 69) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "I don't know. But I've watched them here for twenty years and I've seen the change. They used to rush through here, and it was wonderful to watch, it was the hurry of men who knew where they were going and were eager to get there. Now they're hurrying because they are afraid. It's not a purpose that drives them, it's fear. They're not going anywhere, they're escaping. And I don't think they know what it is that they want to escape. They don't look at one another. They jerk when brushed against. They smile too much, but it's an ugly kind of smiling: it's not joy, it's pleading. I don't know what it is that's happening to the world." (Atlas 64) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "The adversary she found herself forced to fight was not worth matching or beating; it was not a superior ability which she would have found honour in challenging; it was ineptitude -- a grey spread of cotton that seemed soft and shapeless, that could offer no resistance to anything or anybody, yet managed to be a barrier in her way. She stood, disarmed, before the riddle of what made this possible, she could find no answer." (Atlas 55-6) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "What did they seek from him? What were they after? He had never asked anything of them; it was they who wished to hold him, they who pressed a claim on him -- and the seemed to have the form of affection, but it was a form which he found harder to endure than any sort of hatred. He despised causeless affection, just as he despised unearned wealth. They professed to love him for some unknown reason and they ignored all the things for which he could wish to be loved. He wondered what response they could hope to obtain from him in such manner -- if his response was what they wanted. And it was, he though; else why those constant complaints, those unceasing accusations about his indifference? Why that chronic air of suspicion, as if they were waiting to be hurt? He had never had a desire to hurt them, but he had always felt their defensive, reproachful expectation; they seemed wounded by anything he said, it was not a matter of his words or actions, it was almost... almost as if they were wounded by the mere fact of his being. Don't start imagining the insane -- he told himself severely, struggling to face the riddle with the strictest of his ruthless sense of justice. He could not condemn them without understanding; and he could not understand." (Atlas 42-3) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "You're not sorry. You could've been here if you made the effort. But when did you ever make an effort for anybody but yourself? You're not interested in any of us or in anything we do. You think if you pay the bills, that's enough, don't you? Money! That's all you know. And all you give us is money. Have you even given us any time?" (Atlas Shrugged 40) --Ayn Rand ------------------------------------------ "No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently." --Agnes de Mille ------------------------------------------ "The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless." --Jean-Jacques Rousseau ------------------------------------------ "To the rationally minded the mental processes of the intuitive appear to work backwards." --Frances Wickes ------------------------------------------ "Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what people fear most." --Fyodor Dostoyevski ------------------------------------------ "I've noticed that a lot of people consider 'finding yourself' to be a really frivolous and unproductive study. I'm not sure why. Everything important in life really seems to get down-played so children can be encouraged to join the rat race and make as much money as possible, instead of being told that they should be happy first." --Sanjay Singh ------------------------------------------ "The problem with keeping up with the Jones' is that it creates a world full of Jones'." --Julian Barton ------------------------------------------ "... whether your name is Gehrig, or Ripken, DiMaggio, or Robinson, or that of some youngster who picks up his bat or puts on his glove, you are challenged by the game of baseball to do your very best, day in and day out, and that's all I've ever tried to do." --Cal Ripken Jr. ------------------------------------------ "Trust in yourself. Your perceptions are often far more accurate than you are willing to believe." --Claudia Black ------------------------------------------ "Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it you will land among the stars." --Les Brown ------------------------------------------ "Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark." --Agnes de Mille ------------------------------------------ "I feel drunk but I'm sober I'm young and I'm underpaid I'm tired but I'm working, yeah. I care but I'm restless I'm here but I'm really gone I'm wrong and I'm sorry, baby. What it all comes down to Is that everything's gonna be quite alright." --Alanis Morissette ------------------------------------------ "So let me get this straight. You want to fly on a magic carpet to see the King of the Potato People and plead with him for your freedom, and you're telling me you're completely sane?" --from Red Dwarf ------------------------------------------ "Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough -- that we should try harder." --Julia Cameron ------------------------------------------ "When an actor is in the moment, he or she is engaged in listening for the next right thing creatively. When a painter is painting, he or she may begin with a plan, but that plan is soon surrendered to the painting's own plan. This is often expressed as 'The brush takes the next stroke.' In dance, in composition, in sculpture, the experience is the same: we are more the conduit than the creator of what we express." --Julia Cameron ------------------------------------------ "Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however -- that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc." --Ursula K. LeGuin ------------------------------------------ "They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians. I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold, we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children -- though their children were, in fact happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched." --Ursula K. LeGuin ------------------------------------------ "Il a mis le caf‚ Dans la tasse Il a mis le lait Dans la tasse de caf‚ Il a mis le sucre Dans le caf‚ au lait Avec la petite cuiller Il a tourn‚ Il a bu le caf‚ au lait Et il a repos‚ la tasse Sans me parler." [He put the coffee in the cup. He put the milk in the cup of coffee. He put the sugar in the white coffee, with the tea- spoon, he stirred. He drank the white coffee and he put the cup down. Without speaking to me.] --Jacques Pr‚vert ------------------------------------------ "Leap, and the net will appear." --Julia Cameron ------------------------------------------ "Always leave enough time in your life to do something that makes you happy, satisfied, even joyous. That has more of an effect on economic well-being than any other single factor." --Paul Hawken ------------------------------------------ "Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want so that they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then, do what you need to do, in order to have what you want." --Margaret Young ------------------------------------------ "It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult." --Seneca ------------------------------------------ "Eliminate something superfluous from your life. Break a habit. Do something that makes you feel insecure." --Piero Ferrucci ------------------------------------------ "Each painting has its own way of evolving... When the painting is finished, the subject reveals itself." --William Baziotes ------------------------------------------ "Take your life in your own hands and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame." --Erica Jong ------------------------------------------ "I have made my world and it is a much better world than I ever saw outside." --Louise Nevelson ------------------------------------------ "We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own or to other people's models, learn to be ourselves, and allow our natural channel to open." --Shakti Gawain ------------------------------------------ "A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind." --Albert Szent-Gyorgyi ------------------------------------------ "The universe will reward you for taking risks on its behalf." --Shakti Gawain ------------------------------------------ "Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose." --Elisabeth Kbler-Ross ------------------------------------------ "All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh." --Doris Lessing ------------------------------------------ "Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers, 'grow, grow.'" --The Talmud ------------------------------------------ "I am often mad, but I would hate to be nothing but mad: and I think I would lose what little value I may have as a writer if I were to refuse, as a matter of principle, to accept the warming rays of the sun, and to report them, whenever, and if ever, they happen to strike me." --E. B. White ------------------------------------------ "I was always matching wits with authority. Pondering over my past and present hassles, I began to wonder why my life had taken the direction it had. What cosmic forces had led me to this precise moment that saw me, once again, dancing on the rim of the volcano? The answers started to come to me as my life flashed before my eyes. I think it all started when I was arrested as a pyromaniac." --Bill Lee ------------------------------------------ "It's no wonder that our priorities got screwed up. Just because a person can throw a ball harder or hit it further than most ordinary human beings, he is placed on a pedestal at an early age. I don't think there is anything wrong with admiring an exceptionally skilled person, but the hero-worship we shower on athletes goes beyond that. This is a part of the tribal influence handed down by our ancestors. Man has always been lionized for his physical prowess. An Indian brave did not have to pass a math quiz in order to become a chief, he just had to tear the ass of some bear. And the twelve labours of Hercules did not include a Regents' exam. Society has tended to find its heroes in the most obvious arenas, and I don't regard that as a healthy thing. We should find our heroes in the bathroom mirror each and every morning." --Bill Lee ------------------------------------------ "Alcohol is like anything else. It's only as bad as the person it's being poured into. If it's used to heighten an occasion, or to take an edge off stress, I don't see a problem. Trouble starts when you either lose control and let the bottle run you, or when you believe its promises of immortality. You realize that no matter how much you punish yourself, you always seem to wake up the next day. Pretty soon you're convinced that you will never die. What that happens I guess it is time to look for help before you life becomes one long, lost weekend. --Bill Lee ------------------------------------------ "During those moments on the pitching rubber, when you have every pitch at your command working to its highest potential, you are your own universe. For hours after the game, this sense of completeness lingers. Then you sink back to what we humorously refer to as reality. Your body aches and your muscles cry out. You feel your mortality. That can be a difficult thing to handle. I believe pitchers come in touch with death a lot sooner than other players. We are more aware of the subtle changes taking place in our body and are unable to overlook the tell-tale hints that we are not going to last on this planet forever. Every pitcher has to be a little bit in love with death. There's a subconscious fatalism there." --Bill Lee ------------------------------------------ "I stopped watching the game and sat back to watch the fans. It was like watching a Fassbinder film, depicting mankind at its most berserk. The experience made me wonder if we're not breeding a society that lacks self-esteem. I don't think we pat people on the back enough, letting them know that being able to fix a sink is just as much skill as being able to get Rod Carew out with the bases loaded. And more worthwhile, if you were to ask me. People must be made to feel their value. Otherwise, when they discover they can't find any thrills in religion or in cults, they head out to the ballpark, seeking a vicarious sense of fulfilment. They're tired of long-term reality; they don't recognize what it has to offer them. All they want is one good fantasy. Realizing that really shook me up." --Bill Lee ------------------------------------------ "I don't get upset over things I can control, because if I can control them there's no sense in getting upset. And I don't get upset over things I can't control, because if I can't control them there's no sense in getting upset." --Mickey Rivers ------------------------------------------ "There's a saying that no man is an island, which I completely disagree with. I believe that a man should be self-sufficient. What I propose is almost socialistic, almost communistic: Each person should have his own plot of land and grow their food. They should each have a civil service job and contribute equally. If you don't contribute then you don't eat and you die. Don't be a burden on those people that are breaking their backs to work." --Peter Steele ------------------------------------------ "Whether left or right, when views get that extreme then they become warped and open to the sickness of the person holding them." --Peter Steele ------------------------------------------ "I know what you're going to say! 'They are men, and men should be free.' A free man is dangerous to himself and everyone else. Freedom should be left to those who can put it to good use..." --Dave Sim ------------------------------------------ "You just gotta keep going on. Get up, and do your job. Go to work, get through each day, one day at a time, like that. And you hope that one day, you'll get up and it'll hurt a little less. You just gotta just get through it. You just go on. It's that simple." --from Homicide: Life on the Street ------------------------------------------ "All I want is to be back where things make sense. Where I won't have to be afraid all the time. Only one thing stops me. A promise I made..." --from The Shawshank Redemption ------------------------------------------ "What do you really want to know? Am I sorry for what I did? There's not a day goes by I don't feel regret. Not because I'm in here, but because you think I should be. I look back on the way I was. A young, stupid kid that committed that terrible crime. I want to talk to him. I want to try to talk some sense to him. Tell him the way things are. But I can't. That kid's long gone, and this old man is all that's left." --from The Shawshank Redemption ------------------------------------------ "I've had some long nights in the stir. Alone in the dark, with nothing but your thoughts, time can draw out like a blade. That was the longest night of my life." --from The Shawshank Redemption ------------------------------------------ "It floats around, it's got to land on somebody. It was my turn, that's all. I was in the path of the tornado. I didn't expect the storm would last as long as it has." --from The Shawshank Redemption ------------------------------------------ "Gone is the blinding glow in his hands -- gone, too, is the illusion of purity and beauty! In it's place all that remains is mind-numbing, spine-chilling reality!" --Dave Sim ------------------------------------------ "When I start the book, I'm The Writer. The writer bitches for a week about how he never has any fun, he's tired of being funny all the time, and nobody cares about him anyhow. This is followed by a period of deep intense silence, much staring at walls, punctuated by cheery optimism on the order of: 'That's it! I'm Dead! I can't think of an ending!' or 'I'm just going to have to scrap the first ten pages -- they're lousy.' Often it is less coherent than that -- reduced to the more succinct, 'Garbage! It's all GARBAGE!'" --Dave Sim ------------------------------------------ "Life moves pretty fast, if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." --from Ferris Bueller's Day Off ------------------------------------------ "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death, your right to say it." --Voltaire ------------------------------------------ "All the world's a stage, and the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts." --William Shakespeare ------------------------------------------ "Forgive you enemies, but never forget their names." --John F. Kennedy ------------------------------------------ "Only those who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible." ------------------------------------------ "The truth is an anagram of an anagram." --Umberto Eco ------------------------------------------ "Floating, falling, sweet intoxication Touch me, trust me, savour each sensation. Let the dream begin, let you darker side give in." --from The Phantom of the Opera ------------------------------------------ "It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others." ------------------------------------------ "You know, I got a daughter, she lives in Michigan. When she was six years old we took her to the circus, one minute she's laughing at the clowns, you know, getting out of the Volkswagon. The next minute she's telling me that her stomach hurts. Soon she's crying, then she's screaming. We drove her right to the emergency room, and she's got a fever, it's too high. The doctors poke and prod, and still they can't find anything wrong. Now her vital signs weaken, and they put her on an IV and they still can't find anything wrong. Not anything. One day I walked into her room, and the nurse was trying to put in a new IV and she couldn't find the spot. Her little veins were weak, and [she] starts getting afraid of the needle, and she looked up at me and said 'Daddy, make it better.' I can't you how I felt, when she looked up at me and said that, I couldn't make it better. There was nothing I could do. She was my daughter and I was so powerless. I felt so powerless." --from Homicide: Life on the Street ------------------------------------------ "Have you ever noticed, detective, that there are people in this world who can tell stories, but they're not the ones that write them? People don't grow wealthy or powerful through virtue or intelligence or hard work, though those things do figure in. They grow wealthy and powerful because they know how to take what's in front of them and shape it, and use it." --from Under Suspicion ------------------------------------------ "Writing will be your companion through the darkest and brightest days of your life -- if that is what you want. It exposes pain and guilt and the greatest joy. It is your own assessment of who you are. You should write as much as you can and as much as you want to. It will be something to turn to." --Sharda Tarachandra ------------------------------------------ "You can never run away from a weakness. You must sometime fight it or perish, and if that be so, why not now, and where you stand?" --Robert Louis Stevenson ------------------------------------------ "At first he thought he felt bad because he was afraid of leading an army, but it wasn't true. He knew he'd make a good commander. He felt himself wanting to cry. He hadn't cried since the first few days of homesickness after he got here. He tried to put a name on the feeling that put a lump in his throat and made him sob silently, however much he tried to hold it down. He bit down on his hand to stop the feeling, to replace it with pain. It didn't help." --Orson Scott Card ------------------------------------------ "Ender stepped under the water and rinsed himself, took the sweat of combat and let it run down the drain. All gone, except they recycled it and we'll be drinking Bonzo's blood water in the morning. All the life gone out of it, but his blood just the same, his blood and my sweat, washed down in their stupidity or cruelty or whatever it was that made them let it happen." --Orson Scott Card ------------------------------------------ "There was no doubt now in Ender's mind. There was no help for him. Whatever he faced, now and forever, no one would save him from it. Peter might be scum, but he had been right, always right; the power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can't kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you." --Orson Scott Card ------------------------------------------ "Whether he likes it or not, [he] cannot remain incognito forever. He has outraged too many wise men and pleased too many fools to hide behind his too-appropriate order to assume leadership of the forces of stupidity he has marshalled, or his enemies will unmask him in order to better understand the disease that has produced such a warped and twisted mind." --Orson Scott Card ------------------------------------------ "Well, I'm your man. I'm the bloody bastard you wanted when you had me spawned. I'm your tool, and what difference does it make if I hate the part of me that you most need? What difference does it make that when the little serpents killed me in the game, I agreed with them, and was glad." --Orson Scott Card ------------------------------------------ "I'll put it bluntly. Human beings are free except when humanity needs them. Maybe humanity needs you. To do something. Maybe humanity needs me -- to find out what you're good for. We might both do despicable things, but if humankind survives, then we were good tools." --Orson Scott Card ------------------------------------------ "This is the essence of the transaction between storyteller and audience. The 'true' story is not the one that exists in my mind; it is certainly not the written words on the bound paper that you hold in your hands. The story in my mind is nothing but a hope; the text of the story is the tool I created in order to try to make that hope a reality. The story itself, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears." --Orson Scott Card ------------------------------------------ "... All these readers have placed themselves inside this story, not as spectators, but as participants, and so have looked at the world, not with my eyes only, but also with their own." --Orson Scott Card ------------------------------------------ "[It] was written and sold. I knew it was a strong story because I cared about it and believed in it. I had no idea that it would have the effect it had on the audience. While most people ignored it, of course, and continue to live full and happy lives without reading it or anything else by me, there was still a surprisingly large group who responded to the story with some fervency." --Orson Scott Card ------------------------------------------ "I don't pray anymore. I used to, I used to pray for answers. A clue, a sign of what I should do. How to find something precious in this life. There was a time when I thought it was my work, my job, but is it? Nothing in this world changes because of what I do. The hurt goes on and on. God has given up on us. He doesn't hear us anymore..." --from Homicide: Life on the Street ------------------------------------------ "Singers attract fans with aspects to their own personality. People feel I'm passionate and obsessive. They know this isn't a profession for me, it's a vocation. It's not an egotistical thing, but something else. I'm in a dialogue with my audience, and that's something I need." --Morrissey ------------------------------------------ "Passivity is the culprit. Think of yourself as the victim, you become the victim." --from Law & Order ------------------------------------------ "When I was very young, I went to a grade school in New York City called Saint Bart's for Boys. We used to call it the fortress, that's because the outside of the building looked like a medieval fort. But in fact, it was an oasis, right in the middle of my neighbourhood. The brothers and sisters were very strict, you know, my butt caught the bamboo more than a few times. But I didn't hate it. I didn't hate it. Those rules made me feel important, they made me feel worth protecting. I felt safe. And then I went to a Jesuit high school, Saint Ignatius. The Jesuits taught me how to think, I haven't felt safe since." --from Homicide: Life on the Street ------------------------------------------ "I don't want to hope anymore, I almost died from this in the first place, and I don't want to get that down again." --Lisa Neve ------------------------------------------ "And we laughed, at the world. They can have their diamonds, And we'll have our pearls." --Jill Sobule ------------------------------------------ "In an insane world, it was the sanest choice." --from Terminator 2 ------------------------------------------ "It was a truly discomforting state. The world seemed distant, as though he were looking at it through smoky glass. Sounds were eerily muted, even those of the traffic outside and a cat in the alley under his window. His sense of touch was obscured as well, as if he were wearing oven mitts. He had difficulty remembering anything clearly. It was a little bit like being really, really drunk, with the room spinning around and a feeling like had stepped away from the world. Except that the dimness made it feel as if the world were trying to pull away from him. Everything but death and loss seemed uncertain. Death and loss were the only constants in his life." --Don Bassingthwaite ------------------------------------------ "There was too much noise. Sirens from police cars and ambulances. Shouts from the crowd on the street eighteen floors below. Traffic from other streets and all of the noises of San Francisco. Mostly, though, there were the voices. Whispering to him. Reminding him of the dark things he had done -- all of the little things he had forgotten, all of the big things he had tried to forget. Mostly they reminded him of his biggest secret, a betrayal of trust and friendship long ago. He squeezed his eyes shut as if that could somehow keep the voices away." --Don Bassingthwaite ------------------------------------------ "For the past weeks I'd been reacting. That was no way to win. To win, you take the initiative. You instigate the action. You make the opponent react to you." --Richard Marcinko ------------------------------------------ "When you fight, you don't fight for abstract values like the flag, or the nation, or democracy. You fight for your buddy. You fight to keep him alive, and he fights to keep you alive, and you go on that way, day after day, battle after battle. And when one of your buddies dies, something inside you dies as well. But you go on. You fight, so that his death isn't meaningless, his sacrifice isn't for nothing." --Richard Marcinko ------------------------------------------ "Your politics are your's. You've never thrown in. The minute you do that, their doctrines become your's. You can be held responsible." --from The X-Files ------------------------------------------ "I just want to be happy, and I'm so afraid that I never will be." --from E.R. ------------------------------------------ "Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced." --James Baldwin ------------------------------------------ "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." --Margaret Mead ------------------------------------------ "You must be the change you wish to see in the world." --Mohandas Gandhi ------------------------------------------ "Science is a body of truths which offers clear and certain knowledge about the real world and is therefore superior to tradition, philosophy, religion, dogma, and superstition which offer shadowy knowledge about an ideal world." --Donald DeMarco ------------------------------------------ "You ruined my life. I lost my wife, my kid, my work. I lost everything all because of a little bad luck. You gotta pay for that man, you gotta pay. Otherwise there's no justice in this world, otherwise it's all meaningless. You can't just do something, and then pretend you didn't, that it didn't happen, that somehow you weren't involved. You were, you did. It's your fault. And now you gotta die for it." --from Homicide: Life on the Street ------------------------------------------ "He had regrets, of course, but not so many that he would lose any sleep over them. Life surprised him now and then and he didn't much care for surprises, unless he was passing them out. But -- what was to be done? You had to deal with the reality, he had learned that over the years, no matter how much you didn't like it." --Steve Perry ------------------------------------------ "Did that myth at the heart of all the fairy tales her mother had told her, that part about happily ever after, ever really work out that way? How many children around the galaxy had been given that pretty picture, had swallowed it entire, only to grow up and find that reality was not so simple, not so beautiful, not so easy? The story didn't end when the brave princess killed the wicked queen and rescued the prince. That, she was learning, was the easy part. The hard part came when the guns were cleaned and reholstered, the bodies of the villains cremated, and the day-to- day business of life reared its ugly cobra's head and grinned down at you. When your prince had doubts you couldn't answer for him, when you had doubts he could only shrug at, that, that was the hard part. That was the part the stories hadn't addressed." --Steve Perry ------------------------------------------ "You know what it is that makes a leader? Sacrifice. Sacrifice yourself and men will follow you anywhere." --from Back in Action ------------------------------------------ "You know, everyday I get out of bed and drag myself to the next cup of coffee. I take a sip and the caffeine kicks in. I can focus my eyes again. My brain starts to order the day. I'm up, I'm alive. I'm ready to rock. But the time is coming when I wake up and decide that I'm not getting out of bed. Not for coffee, or food, or sex. If it comes to me, fine. If it won't, fine. No more expectations. The longer I live the less I know. I should know more, I should know the coffee's killing me. You're suspicious of your suspicions? I'm jealous. I'm so jealous. You still have the heart to have doubts. Me? I'm going to lock up a 14 year old kid for what could be the rest of his natural life. I got to do this. This is my job. This is the deal. This is the law. This is my day. I have no doubts or suspicions about it. Heart has nothing to do with it anymore. It's all in the coffee." --from Homicide: Life on the Street ------------------------------------------ "Why did you make it so hard for me? I'd rather empty the ocean with a sieve. I do it for you. Or count the grains of sand on every beach. All for you. There are so many people, so many countries. But I have time. All the time in the world. Eternity." --Grant Morrison ------------------------------------------ "And when it's all done, when there's no one left you'll come back for me. And tell me who I am and why I have to do what I do. And explain 'Eternity.' You'll come back." --Grant Morrison ------------------------------------------ "Why am I in Hell? It hurts. It hurts all the time. Why am I in Hell? I just want to go home and lie on the bed the way I used to. Please take me home." --Grant Morrison ------------------------------------------ "Paintings may not have nearly the power to convert people that the printed or spoken word has, but each man has his part to play in the human and divine drama -- some persons just a few lines, others whole pages. To refuse to play one's role at all is not the answer. It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness." --William Kurelek ------------------------------------------ "Days of my life I'd like to forget: The day the doctors told me I was sick. The day I had to tell my friends I was ill. The day my hair fell out. The first day after my surgery. They're also the days I'll always remember." --Kate Sawford ------------------------------------------ "Do not look for rest in any pleasure, because you were not created for pleasure: you were created for Joy. And if you do not know the difference between pleasure and joy you have not yet begun to live." --Thomas Merton ------------------------------------------ "More than any other time in history, humanity faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." --Woody Allen ------------------------------------------ "Opera once was an important social instrument -- especially in Italy. With Rossini and Verdi people were listening to opera together and having the same catharsis with the same story, the same moral dilemmas. They were holding hands in the darkness. That has gone. Now perhaps they are holding hands watching television." --Luciano Berio ------------------------------------------ "People are brave enough to spit into an open wound, the problem is that they're so afraid, that they'll only do it after the beast is dead." --Sanjay Singh ------------------------------------------ "Keep staring at the stars and someday they will collapse." --James J. Montgomery ------------------------------------------ "Soaks my skin -- through to the bone Pain is nothing that a downpour won't erase Rain -- you can't hold on to it A treasure you cannot frame Rain -- somehow I'm drawn to it I feel engaged, one and the same When heaven's dressing beads off my face The pain is nothing that a downpour won't erase." --Delerium ------------------------------------------ "I was born to fight your brand of order!" --from The Adventures of Batman & Robin ------------------------------------------ "You actually care about those creatures, you're just as crazy as they are." --from The Adventures of Batman & Robin ------------------------------------------ "I've seen how you treat your prisoners. Forgotten and scared without hope or compassion." --from The Adventures of Batman & Robin ------------------------------------------ "The morning sun rises to greet him, and in its low, warm light he stands like some sort of pagan god, or deposed tyrant, staring out over the city he's sworn to... stare out over. And it's evident, just by looking at him that he's got some pretty heavy things on his mind." --from The Tick ------------------------------------------ "We cannot go ahead without leaving something behind." --Lemuel K. Washburn ------------------------------------------ "It is harder to live when those we love are dead." --Lemuel K. Washburn ------------------------------------------ "There is no sadder grief than that which lies at the bottom of a life that has been wrecked through deception." --Lemuel K. Washburn ------------------------------------------ "Have a good time, make life cheerful and bright, dance if you want to, sing if you can, play as long as you live and leave the world with a smile." --Lemuel K. Washburn ------------------------------------------ "To correct in ourselves what we condemn in others would remove most of the evils of life." --Lemuel K. Washburn ------------------------------------------ "History shows that there is nothing so easy to enslave and nothing so hard to emancipate as ignorance, hence it becomes the double enemy of civilization. By its servility it is the prey of tyranny, and by its credulity it is the foe of enlightenment." --Lemuel K. Washburn ------------------------------------------ "The statue of liberty that will endure on this continent is not the one made of granite or bronze, but the one made of love of freedom." --Lemuel K. Washburn ------------------------------------------ "I saw you with your envoy A consenting adult Technique in moderation But vogue to the cult Me I've got my strangers To exile in the night I guess I'm just addicted To the pain of delight." --Melissa Etheridge ------------------------------------------ "Go on and close your eyes, go on imagine me there She's got similar features with longer hair And if that's what it takes to get you through Go on and close your eyes it shouldn't bother you." --Melissa Etheridge ------------------------------------------ "I was about to tell him he was wrong to dwell on it, because it really didn't matter. But he cut me off and urged me one last time, drawing himself up to his full height and asking me if I believed in God. I said no. He sat down indignantly. He said it was impossible; all men believed in God, even those who turn their backs on him. That was his belief, and if he were ever to doubt it, his life would become meaningless. 'Do you want my life to be meaningless?' he shouted. As far as I could see, it didn't have anything to do with me, and I told him so. But from across the table he had already thrust the crucifix in my face was screaming irrationally, 'I am a Christian. I ask Him to forgive you for sins. How can you not believe that He suffered for you?' I was struck by how sincere he seemed, but I had had enough. It was getting hotter and hotter. As always, whenever I want to get rid of someone I'm not really listening to, I made it appear as if I agreed. To my surprise, he acted triumphant. 'You see, you see!' he said. 'You do believe, don't you, and you're going to place your trust in Him, aren't you?' Obviously, I again said no. He fell back in his chair" --Albert Camus ------------------------------------------ "It's very hard to let someone in when you've caused so much pain. To risk the emotion." --from Forever Knight ------------------------------------------ "Just one more time to touch you Just one more time to tell you You're on my mind Baby, why can't I have you You're breaking my heart in two You know what I'm going through Oh baby, why can't I have you?" --The Cars ------------------------------------------ "Who's gonna tell you when it's too late Who's gonna tell you things aren't so great You can't go on, thinking nothing's wrong Who's gonna drive you home, tonight? Who's gonna pick you up when you fall Who's gonna hang it up when you call Who's gonna pay attention to your dreams Who's gonna plug their ears, when you scream?" --The Cars ------------------------------------------ "You see with your eyes. This means you can be misled by charm, by outward appearance. By webs of glamour, by surface pretences. I do not see with my eyes. I see good and I see evil. Nothing else." --Neil Gaiman ------------------------------------------ "I do not permit affection, or lack thereof, to influence my actions. There is good, and there is evil. The good must be protected; the evil eradicated. I have shown you the triumph of evil, as a caution." --Neil Gaiman ------------------------------------------ "You wish to see the distant realms? Very well. But know this first, the places you will visit, the places you will see, do not exist. For there are only two worlds -- your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this one, worlds of the human imagination. Their reality, or lack of reality is not important. What is important is that they are there. These worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power, provide refuge and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters. Do you understand?" --Neil Gaiman ------------------------------------------ "There aren't any good guys, and there aren't any bad guys. There's just us. People. Doing our best to get by." --Neil Gaiman ------------------------------------------ "People kill what they fear. They burned, and drowned, and hanged those they saw as witches, the devil's servants: the wise women and the cunning men, the unfortunate, the lost and the strange." --Neil Gaiman ------------------------------------------ "The red flame flickers on the wall of the cave (smeared with ochre, berry dye, charcoal) Making the great elk move, Making the mastodon breath, Making the hunters race and kill. Watch them seeking to placate and understand the world above This they know. This they understand. There is darkness, everywhere, outside. The dark is everywhere; and though the sun comes up, And though the fires blossom and are tamed, The darkness is there, The darkness is waiting. As the things in the darkness That whisper before they feast, They are to be placated and persuaded, They are to be loved and sacrificed to, They are to be prayed to and distrusted. And so there is magic." --Neil Gaiman ------------------------------------------ "Living is easy with eyes closed Misunderstand all you see It's getting hard to be someone but it all works out It doesn't matter much to me." --The Beatles ------------------------------------------ "Pain. I started cuttings on myself when I was quite young. The backs of my arms. I did it with a knife. I didn't learn it from anyone. It was the way I knew I was alive and human. At the time I hadn't developed enough to understand why I was doing it." --Greta, body piercer ------------------------------------------ "There were times in my life when I couldn't feel anything any more. Everything became too much. I felt numb all the time. I couldn't feel happy or sad." --Greta, body piercer ------------------------------------------ "Girls ask to suck my blood. They aren't too shy about asking me. I can easily show you scars all over me where I've taken razor blades and opened myself up and let them stick their tongues into me." --Peter Steele ------------------------------------------ "For a long time, I did not know who I was, I did not know what I wanted. I was crushed by peer pressure, and I listened to a lot of people because I was told by a lot of people around me that I was a moron. And now I've realized that it's not me that's fucked up. It is the rest of the world. I'm certainly not a genius but I believe I've found myself." --Peter Steele ------------------------------------------ "I think I'm a blue-collar worker from Brooklyn. This thing just fell into my lap and it is an opportunity to escape urban blight. I'm a social retard, and I have a hard time dealing with people. I don't like crowds, I don't like noise, I don't like people, I don't like being questioned. I just want to be left alone." --Peter Steele ------------------------------------------ "Censorship is almost systematically the weapon of first resort for governments in uncertain political situations. So not only are the famous writers and bold journalists in danger; at every level of public and private life, the freedoms to think, read or write are denied. In the absence of a free press, other human rights abuses flourish unabated. Nothing is reported, criticized, questioned. The example of imprisonment, torture or execution imposes a further silence. A blindly obedient mob mentality is encouraged, driven by extremist religious or ethnic loyalties. The citizens do not know what is happening. Fear and ignorance permeate discussion." --Marian Botsford Fraser ------------------------------------------ "To start blindly with a statement is a sign of arrogance and narrow-mindedness, and will lead to conflict. To start blindly with a question is a sign of uncertainty and honesty, and will lead to wisdom." --Scott "Jesus" Watson ------------------------------------------ "You've seen [angst] (you know you have) late at night, in a mirror. It has deep, hollow eyes -- too exhausted to close -- and looks like someone you thought you knew." --Dirk John Fischer ------------------------------------------ "Wake when others wake. Take what others take. Feed when others feed. Need what others need. Share what others share. Care when others care. Feel what others feel. Is it real? If you love what others love. You will never rise above. You will stay where others stay. Play games they like to play. And when they grow tired, you will fall asleep. Because to follow is the nature of the sheep." --Luke Gasteiger ------------------------------------------ "Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught." --Oscar Wilde ------------------------------------------ "True education makes for inequality; the inequality of individuality, the inequality of success, the glorious inequality of talent, of genius; for inequality, not mediocrity, individual superiority, not standardization, is the measure of the progress of the world." --Felix E. Schelling ------------------------------------------ "Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon." --E. M. Forster ------------------------------------------ "The paradox of education is precisely this -- that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated." --James Baldwin ------------------------------------------ "It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind." --James Baldwin ------------------------------------------ "The real leader has no need to lead -- he is content to point the way." --Henry Miller ------------------------------------------ "The art of leadership... consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary and taking care that nothing will split up that attention... The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to one category." --Adolf Hitler ------------------------------------------ "I read the news today oh boy About a lucky man who made the grade And though the news was rather sad Well I just had to laugh I saw the photograph. He blew his mind out in a car He didn't notice that the lights had changed A crowd of people stood and stared They'd seen his face before Nobody was really sure If he was from the House of Lords." --The Beatles ------------------------------------------ "Fear, it's the oldest tool of power. If you're distracted by fear of those around you, it keeps you from seeing the actions of those above." --from The X-Files ------------------------------------------ "Reporters crowd around you house, Going through you garbage like a pack of hounds Speculating what they might find out, It don't matter now, you're all washed up. You wake up in the middle of the night You sheets are wet and your face is white, You tried to make a good thing last, How could something so good, go bad, so fast." --Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young ------------------------------------------ "There was thunder There was lightning Then the stars went out And the moon fell from the sky..." --Tom Waits ------------------------------------------ "I'm just hoping that one day the sheep will realize that the shepherd is really a wolf in disguise." --Sanjay Singh ------------------------------------------ "Fifty or sixty shooters had already arrived and managed to look studiously bored. I knew a few of them and nodded politely. No one asked me to sit next to them, nor would I have accepted if they had. It's better that way, in case you end up on opposite sides of a fight, and a whole lot safer. Friends can betray you. Strangers can't." --William C. Deitz ------------------------------------------ "You thought you knew what pain was. You thought that whatever happened, you could handle it. You thought that you were in control. You thought wrong. Now you've lost it all. She's gone. All that's left is the numbing pain. You have to let go to stop the pain, but you can't. It's like a drug to you now. You don't want to need it, but it has become a part of you, and it won't loosen its grip on you. The control you once fought for, is gone. You have no control. And you just don't care." --Sanjay Singh ------------------------------------------ "You've bought into the 'system' your whole life, and it got you nowhere. You were at the top of your class in high school, you were the darling of your sorority, and people still treated you like your success was a way to prove their 'system' was right. No more. You get by on your own... with the help of someone who works for you now." --from Wraith: The Oblivion ------------------------------------------ "The world is his canvas, and he wants to take up sculpting." --from Wraith: The Oblivion ------------------------------------------ "You are inspired. Anything you say is brilliant, especially if it contradicts what other people normally believe. Create! Destroy! Live!" --from Wraith: The Oblivion ------------------------------------------ "[He] does not belong; reality itself does not accept his surreal visions. Why hold back? Why shouldn't he reshape the world into something that will accept him? He's been shut out long enough." --from Wraith: The Oblivion ------------------------------------------ "Obviously, [she] should learn a little about reality. True love does not conquer all. How foolish she is to believe in 'young love.' Stories like that always end in tears. Her romance certainly did. Seeing young lovers most [her], because it reminds her of her own pain -- the pain her Psyche and her need for blissful passion gave her." --from Wraith: The Oblivion ------------------------------------------ "The true artist must be open to anything! Expand your mind, man; stretch it like a big red balloon! You think that's crazy! Look at all the unhappy people, look at all the conformity, and I'll tell you what's really crazy. Whee! Ants!" --from Wraith: The Oblivion ------------------------------------------ "One must follow what interests one, yes? Life is an exploration of the mind, an exploration of reality. Care for some brie?" --from Wraith: The Oblivion ------------------------------------------ "They found the dog in several pieces in the trash can, occult symbols carved into its fur and something horrible in its mouth. They found the old man hanging from the ceiling in his study, the plastic on the floor was arranged so that none of the blood stained the lily white carpet. They discovered the child hunched down in a closet covered in her own waste, the tears dried away, the hollow eyes looking out at nothing. They say not to go into the Fifth Street alley at night -- it's just not safe. They say that the library is haunted -- that sometimes you can feel the crinkle of plastic under your feet. But you don't care what they say, 'cause you know she's in your closet -- when you close your eyes to sleep you can still hear her muffled screams and the little hands beating at the door..." --from Wraith: The Oblivion ------------------------------------------ "This thing is a man. Look at what you are, and what awaits you. Gaze on this image and learn what your own end will be." --Greek epitaph ------------------------------------------ "Learn the true topography; the monstrous and wonderful archetypes are not inside you, not inside your consciousness; you are inside them, trapped and howling to get out." --R. A. Lafferty ------------------------------------------ "I see the witching moon moving in swift arc, yet not driving with her full face shining night long like torchlight luring in a graveyard. She glows as when magicians spells torment her reins taught. She holds course, hogging the horizon moon. Now your fire has hues of deathly pallor. Pour waves of grim light on the winds to frighten mankind. On grass red with bloodstains, I offer your beasts ritually butchered for you a fire torch snatched from a cremation burns in the night; for you I arch and toss back my head. I sing, I loose my hair, then bind it with sacred headband, and they do at funerals. For you I grip this bough shrivelled with deaths dew. For you I bare my breast, slice into my arms with holy knife, shed my sanity and blood forever." --from Wraith: The Oblivion ------------------------------------------ "Death is but a stepping over, a passage through the Shroud. The moment of death is a rite of passage marking the end of one journey and the beginning of another, a path available to us at any time. The thousands of things undone, the millions of roads not travelled, the longings and regrets; they do not die with the body. Instead they linger on and take a life of their own. They become ghosts. They become shadows. Trapped between this world and the next, wraiths are lost in the immortal gloom of damnation. Held together out of pure misery, they are trapped by their past, their longings and their fear. Many are the products of sudden, violent or cruel deaths. They are bound by a sense of crucial deeds undone, of unsaid words breaking in their hearts, of a life cut short by Fate. Others are consumed by a tragic longing for happiness and fulfilment denied them in life. A few are driven by bitterness, anger or passionate ideals." --from Wraith: The Oblivion ------------------------------------------ "I can't feel you anymore I can't even touch the books you've read I followed you beneath the stars Hounded by your memory And all your raging glory But now I'm finally free I kiss good-bye the howling beast That separated you from me You'll never know the hurt I suffered Nor the pain I rise above And I'll never know the same about you, But soon we'll be together In the clasp of oblivion." --from Wraith: The Oblivion ------------------------------------------ "The conquest of the fear of death is the recovery of life's joy. One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life, but as an aspect of life. Life in its becoming is always shedding death, and on the point of death. The conquest of fear yields the courage of life. That is the cardinal initiation of every heroic adventure -- fearlessness and achievement." --Joseph Campbell ------------------------------------------ "With each passing day oblivion encroaches further. With every soul that surrenders to shadow, the end draws nearer. The world is not as we knew it, decay's sweet stench now clings to all we once held dear. It is called the Shadowlands. In death there is nowhere to hide, nowhere to run, from the hate and fear, the pain and bitterness, the shadow within. Hope is fragile and few have the courage, the passion, to face death, and say, 'I do not go gentle into that good night.'" --from Wraith: The Oblivion ------------------------------------------ "Like you, I am broken and fragile Like you, I am tasting my heart for the first time Like you, I am feeding on slumber Like you, I've left my eyes far behind me Down for the count and still drowning..." --Christian Death ------------------------------------------ "You may never understand How the stranger is inspired For he is always evil, And he is not always wrong..." --Billy Joel ------------------------------------------ "Come with me on wings of dream. I can take you anywhere you want to go -- would you like to have dinner with [her]? Sip cappuccino on the canals of Mars? Walk with me though the Elysian Fields? I promise to have you back before you wake." --from Wraith: The Oblivion ------------------------------------------ "All around you reverberate the songs of the dead. You hear them echoing in high cathedrals, in darkened auditoriums, in your own sleep. All around you wail the songs of the dead: dare you not listen? Listen to what has been sung. Since their death!" --from Wraith: The Oblivion ------------------------------------------ "'Do you trust me?' I asked her. I held out my hand. 'Do you want to see beyond the darkness?' She nodded slowly, and took my hand..." --from Wraith: The Oblivion ------------------------------------------ "Swift as light and as cheers was the idea that broke in upon me. 'I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.'" --Mary Shelly ------------------------------------------ "I act the role in classic style of a martyr Carved with a twisted smile, To bleed the lyric for this song To write the rites to right my wrongs An epitaph to a broken dream To exorcise tis silent scream A scream that's borne from sorrow." --Marillion ------------------------------------------ "Oh children don't you weep and moan Children save your breath You'll draw a pretty pension When your daddy meets his death." --"Hard Times" (traditional ballad) ------------------------------------------ "It was the best of times and the worst of times, and it was all of them at once." --Alan Moore ------------------------------------------ "Death followed by eternity... the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought." --from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead ------------------------------------------ "There were the days when you peered into your self, into the secret places of your heard, and what you saw there made you fair with horror. And then, next day, you didn't know what to make of it, you couldn't interpret the horror you had glimpsed the day before. Yes, you know what evil costs." --Jean-Paul Sartre ------------------------------------------ "The darkness always teemed with unexplained sound -- and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises he heard subside and allow him to hear certain other fainter noises which he suspected were lurking behind them." --H.P. Lovecraft ------------------------------------------ "Darkness, darkness Be my blanket Cover me with the endless night Take away the pain of knowing." --The Youngbloods ------------------------------------------ "The night is my companion, and solitude my guide." --Sarah McLaughlin ------------------------------------------ "He who pretends to look upon death without fear, lies." --Jean-Jacques Rousseau ------------------------------------------ "Someone stole my heart. I haven't gotten it back, because I haven't found anyone to steal it back for me." --Scott "Jesus" Watson ------------------------------------------ "Justice to the left of you Justice to the right Speak when you are spoken to Don't pretend you're right This life's not for living It's for fighting and for wars No matter what the truth is Hold on to what is yours." --Yes ------------------------------------------ "Sometimes you want to run away Sometimes you think you do But you never had a dream like this before And you don't want to ask for more Sometimes you leave a mark Before you know the score." --Ric Ocasek ------------------------------------------ "The great challenge of adulthood is holding on to your idealism after you lose your innocence." --Bruce Springsteen ------------------------------------------ "A life is not important, except in the impact it has on other lives." --Jackie Robinson ------------------------------------------ "I see your face in every flame With no answers I have only myself to blame Of all the women I have known -- they're not you I'd rather be alone." --Type O Negative ------------------------------------------ "I always thought we'd be together And that our love could not be better Well with no warning you were gone I still don't know what went wrong You don't know what I've been through Just want to put my love in you." --Type O Negative ------------------------------------------ "So you've come to say you're very sorry 'It won't happen again -- forgive me?' Time will not heal these wounds And I'm bleeding because of you. Was everything we had just a joke? I've run out of patience, tears, and hope Love does not conquer all And I'm screaming because of you. In the shadow of the light from a black sun Frigid statue standing icy blue and numb Where are the frost giants I've begged for protection? I'm freezing." --Type O Negative ------------------------------------------ "A crimson pool so warm and deep Lulls me to an endless sleep You hand in mine -- I will be brave Take me from this earth An endless night -- this, the end of life From the dark I feel your lips And I taste your bloody kiss." --Type O Negative ------------------------------------------ "Not long ago but far away A rainy winter's day All her pain she kept inside Could no longer hide No cry for help She killed herself Both life and love could not be saved She took them both to the grave." --Type O Negative ------------------------------------------ "See the smile awaitin' in the kitchen Food cookin' and the plates for two Feel the arms that reach out to hold me In the evening when the day is through." --Seals & Crofts ------------------------------------------ "See the curtains hangin' in the window In the evening on a Friday night A little light-a-shinin' through the window Let's me know everything's all right." --Seals & Crofts ------------------------------------------ "It's not that I don't have a conscience, it's just that why should I feel guilty for my present crimes, when my past ones are so much worse?" --Sanjay Singh ------------------------------------------ "The Humanist lives as if this world were all and enough. He is not otherworldly. He holds that the time spent on the contemplation of a possible afterlife is time wasted. He fears no hell and seeks no heaven, save that which he and others created on earth. He willingly accepts the world that exists on this side of the grave as the place for moral struggle and creative living. He seeks the life abundant for his neighbour as for himself. He is content to live one world at a time and let the next life -- if such there may be -- take care of itself. He need not deny immortality; he simply is not interested. His interests are here." --Edwin H. Wilson ------------------------------------------ "Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality: they are the perfect duties. If your morals make you dreary, depend on it they are wrong. I do not say, 'give them up,' for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better men." --Robert Louis Stevenson ------------------------------------------ "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." --Philip K. Dick ------------------------------------------ "I'm just the shadow of the man I used to be And it seems there's no way out of this for me I used to bring you sunshine Now all I do is bring you down. How would it be if you were standing in my shoes Can't you see that it's impossible to choose No, there's no making sense of it Every way I go I have to lose." --Brian May ------------------------------------------ "I suppose people in general can be cruel to one another because it's easier to do the wrong thing; kindness takes an effort most are not willing to exert." --Kersti Kahar ------------------------------------------ "I feel pain everyday of my life. When you see me perform, it's that pain you're seeing coming out. I put all my emotions, all my feelings, and my body on the line. People hurt me, I hurt myself -- mentally, physically." --Henry Rollins ------------------------------------------ "The game's not over. It's on until either I win or I die and I don't plan on dying anytime soon." --Sanjay Singh ------------------------------------------ "And they made the secret pact His knowledge would be tapped The link was based on a respect On their lives they would reflect A perfect state of non-attachment Was striven for and claimed as fact The younger grew and learnt his lesson well All his ideals were intact." --Howard Jones ------------------------------------------ "Oh the pain of life is sweet Is it wrong to long for death? Must I cling to the thrills of life Ash to ash and dust to dust." --Howard Jones ------------------------------------------ "Who wants to compare As if this was a competition Leave that to teachers at school Must preserve their tradition." --Howard Jones ------------------------------------------ "You can see the summit, but you can't reach it It's the last piece of the puzzle, but you just can't make it fit Doctor says you're cured, but you still feel the pain Aspirations in the clouds, but your hopes go down the drain. And you want her and she wants you We want everyone And you want her and she wants you No one, no one, no one ever is to blame." --Howard Jones ------------------------------------------ "Sleep well tonight my prince of darkness, for tomorrow you will have a big day." --Sanjay Singh ------------------------------------------ "These people are so worthless it makes me want to puke blood. I would gladly open fire on them, but if given a choice I'd rather subject them to a slower form of death. They fear me because I'm intelligent and creative. I have something better to do with my time. They are insecure." --Matt Spinks ------------------------------------------ "I am one of the people who threaten them. I am a freak, and according to them anyone who goes against the mold must be eliminated. They practice a kind of reverse eugenics: instead of removing the inferior members of the population, they seek to remove all the superior individuals so that their degraded state becomes the norm, and they no longer feel threatened. Thus, tormenting a freak is looked upon highly in their society." --Matt Spinks ------------------------------------------ "It would be quite enjoyable actually, laughing at them all. Remember this is the future of our country. Laugh boys and girls, because if you do not laugh, you are going to have to cry." --Jason Farnon ------------------------------------------ "Most of all we hate collective identity: every day of your pathetic life you are being put into a little box by society by the way you look or the bands you listen to. Collective identity sucks. Be an individual, don't make it easy to be dismissed in a sentence." --Matt Spinks ------------------------------------------ "Is that what she thinks? Not realizing that alienation and patronization are slow torture? You find yourself listing to NIN, or something equally cliche... but you can't help it... the pain stays for a while (it seems like forever). You want to lash back but how can you when you love that person. Why can't they remember all those wonderful moments that you do? So you lock your heart in brimstone, never to be touched again." ------------------------------------------ "Life is a terminal disease." --Matt Biershbach ------------------------------------------ "People that think logically are a nice contrast to the real world." --Matt Biershbach ------------------------------------------ "When you finally make the ends meet, they move the ends." --Matt Biershbach ------------------------------------------ "If I would have been in a different world Like I frequently am when I see you Oh I might have missed All the ways you try to give If only you knew what you do to me Sometimes I think about eternity If it would have been another time I wonder what you would of had in mind." --Ric Ocasek ------------------------------------------ "Telephone again, want to pick it up Could be a friend, but I can't pick it up..." --Ric Ocasek ------------------------------------------ "Never mind a world That can't see past brutality Answers are getting the gas Live gestures Have constantly been used As weapons" --Ric Ocasek ------------------------------------------ "The world is not all rosy, There is no universal justice. No one ever gets what they deserve The rich keep on getting richer And climbing up on the bodies of the poor. The innocent always die, unknown and forgotten The rich, the mighty, the powerful can't buy immortality but at least someone notices when they die." --Sanjay Singh ------------------------------------------ "I cannot live with You - It would be Life - And Life is over there - Behind the Shelf." --Emily Dickinson ------------------------------------------ "Pain - has an element of Blank - It cannot recollect When it begun - or if there were A time when it was not..." --Emily Dickinson ------------------------------------------ "Every time you get up you get kicked in the head, Sooner or later you learn to play dead." --Sanjay Singh ------------------------------------------ "It said what a terrible world this was -- with a smile on its face." --Jerry Dammers ------------------------------------------ "I am tired I am weary I could sleep for thousand years A thousand dreams that would awake me Different colours made of tears." --Velvet Underground ------------------------------------------ "Severen, severen speaks so slightly Severen down on your bended knee Taste the whip in love not given lightly Taste the whip now bend for me." --Velvet Underground ------------------------------------------ "This entire opus is respectfully dedicated to all those who have loved unconditionally only to have their hearts unanaesthetically ripped out: base not your joy upon the deeds of others, for what is given can be taken away. NO HOPE = NO FEAR." --Peter Steele ------------------------------------------ "...so the system's crazier than the people that it's trying to help?" --from Law & Order ------------------------------------------ "If you want to talk about it, I got the time When you're looking so enchanted, you cover my mind If you think I'll wait forever, maybe you're right There's no such thing as now or never, there's only twilight." --Ric Ocasek ------------------------------------------ "Don't look to me. Don't ask for help. Don't ask for anything that you can do yourself." --Lemmy Kilmister ------------------------------------------ "Life is but an unfair circle, intertwined among the ruins of my salvation as a soul of this universe. My humble despair deserves no such fate; perhaps sometime in the near distant future I may live to say 'this really sucks!'" --Eric Dransfeldt ------------------------------------------ "Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don't plan it, don't wait for it, just let it happen. It could be a new shirt at the men's store, a cat-nap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot, black coffee." --from Twin Peaks ------------------------------------------ "Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints." --Ralph Waldo Emerson ------------------------------------------ "What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?" --Ursula K. LeGuin ------------------------------------------ "If people are allowed to love life, then they should also be allowed to hate it." --Brian Fox ------------------------------------------ "The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been." --Alan Ashley-Pitt ------------------------------------------ "Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first." --Mark Twain ------------------------------------------ "Never appeal to a man's 'better nature,' he may not have one. Invoking his self-interest gives you more leverage." --Lazarus Long ------------------------------------------ "Beware of altruism. It is based on self-deception, the root of all evil." --Lazarus Long ------------------------------------------ "Waiting for the winds of change to sweep the clouds away. Waiting for the rainbow's end to cast its gold your way... You don't get something for nothing. You can't have freedom for free." --Neil Peart ------------------------------------------ "... and so castles made of sand slip into the sea eventually." --Jimi Hendrix ------------------------------------------ "Speak out. You've got to speak out against the madness." --Steven Stills ------------------------------------------ "I want your blood. And I want your soul. And I want them both right now!" --from Tombstone ------------------------------------------ "You tell him I'm coming! And hell's coming with me!" --from Tombstone ------------------------------------------ "If you were happy every day of your life, you wouldn't be a human being. You'd be a game show host." --from Heathers ------------------------------------------ "This is not a perfect world. In a perfect world, evil loses." --from Deep Red ------------------------------------------ "[It] was the kind of town where they spell trouble T-R-U-B-I-L, and if you try to correct them, they kill you." --from Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid ------------------------------------------ "Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought, and why we died. All that matters is that today, two stood against many. Valour pleases you, so grant me this one request. Grant me revenge! And if you do not listen, the HELL with you!" --from Conan the Barbarian ------------------------------------------ "If he'd just pay me what he's paying them to stop me robbing him, I'd stop robbing him." --from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid ------------------------------------------ "I have vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals." --from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid ------------------------------------------ "The light that burns twice as bright, burns half as long -- and you have burned so very, very brightly." --from Blade Runner ------------------------------------------ "He's got a client who shot his wife in the head six times. Six times, can you imagine it? I mean, even twice would be overdoing it, don't you think?" --from The Birds ------------------------------------------ "You still don't know what you're dealing with do you? Perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility... I admire its purity, a survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse or delusions of morality." --from Aliens ------------------------------------------ "He's acting alone. He's cut off from his chain of command. He's exhibiting symptoms of pressure-induced psychosis, and he has a nuclear weapon. So as a personal favour to me, would you lay off him?" --from The Abyss ------------------------------------------ "Every life, every day, is in danger. That's just life." --from The X-Files ------------------------------------------ "Anything worth anything has a price. When I'm standing next to your deathbed, looking as young as I look right now, and I see that fear in your eyes at the moment of death, then tell me the price is too stiff." --from The X-Files ------------------------------------------ "Look, what nobody realizes is that there is no afterlife. I know this because when we prolong our lives by taking theirs, all I see is such horror in their eyes. And that's because at that moment they're face to face with death and they suddenly realize that there's nothing else. There's no heaven, there's no soul, there's just rot and there's just decay." --from The X-Files ------------------------------------------ "Something was dead in each of us, and what was dead was hope." --from In The Nursery ------------------------------------------ "This isn't hell, but you can see it from here." --James O'Barr ------------------------------------------ "The only way to be happy is to love to suffer." --Woody Allen ------------------------------------------ "The climate of our culture is changing. Under these new rains, new suns, small things grow great, and what was great grows small; whole species disappear and are replaced." --Randall Jarrell ------------------------------------------ "Life still sucks and it always will because all existences are pointless, worthless and superfluous to all the other existences surrounding them. Even if you find someone special in your life and see the significance for your own life in their existence take one step back and you realize that the two of you are existing as one insignificant and superfluous life." --A.M. Gauthier ------------------------------------------ "Why does everything have to be so significant? Finding significance in your life doesn't necessarily make you happy." ------------------------------------------ "Avoid the question 'why me?'. It saves a lot of grief." --Wilhelmina Baird ------------------------------------------ "They're getting crazier every day, the whole world's going crazy. And you got to take your mind out to keep your smile in place." --Wilhelmina Baird ------------------------------------------ "We're all racing against time. We know it. Either we get enough together to get off this Christ-forgotten planet while we're still young or we're going to end up under it before we've a chance to get old." --Wilhelmina Baird ------------------------------------------ "If you are going to deal in death, you should be willing to see the truth of it, not some glorious lie. If I have a battle with another sword player, it is between the two of us, our business, our truth. But if you run a planet and you get pissed off at somebody the next orbit over, you each might send a million soldiers to recycling plants. A smart rocket can come from a thousand klicks away to kill you; it doesn't care and it won't be in the least upset that it has blasted you to atomic debris. That's the real horror of modern war, that it is impersonal. Being cut with a sword hurts, and if you are close enough to do it, you can't miss the other's pain." --Steve Perry ------------------------------------------ "If you shoot a man across a field or even a room, you don't get the full impact of what you've done. Facing an opponent one-on- one, hand-to-hand or with a sword, you have to accept your personal responsibility. Killing somebody ought to be messy. You should be sprayed with his blood, you should be able to hear him scream, catch the death rattle, smell the faeces and urine as the bowels and bladder let go. You should have to dispose of the body. So you know exactly what it was you did." --Steve Perry ------------------------------------------ "This would be a tricky operation, no doubt of that, and a mistake would probably be fatal. So many things he had done over the years would have been fatal, had his luck not been strongly good. He had cheated death dozens of times, but that did not mean he could take it as a given. A man needed only one fatal mistake to end the game." --Steve Perry ------------------------------------------ "When they'd been on the run, with death maybe lying in wait around any corner, they had never been more alive. When each day might be your last, it made a big difference. You couldn't maintain that state forever, of course; the stress would eat you alive, but putting yourself at risk did bring out your best--or your worst." --Steve Perry ------------------------------------------ "There's always a price for what you want." --Steve Perry ------------------------------------------ "The injury that we do to a man must be such that we need not fear his vengeance." --Steve Perry ------------------------------------------ "I want to know God's thoughts, the rest are details." --Albert Einstein ------------------------------------------ "Cage of freedom, that's our prison; we're the jailer and captive combined Cage of freedom, cast in power; all the trappings of our own design. Blind ambition, steals our reason; we're soon behind those invisible bars On the inside, looking outside; to make it safer we double the guard." --Jon Anderson ------------------------------------------ "There are three kinds of brains: the one understands things unassisted, the other understands things when shown by others, the third understands neither alone nor with the explanations of others." --Niccolo Machiavelli ------------------------------------------ "There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first kind is excellent, the second good, and the third kind useless." --Niccolo Machiavelli ------------------------------------------ "There is no comfort in change But also no learning in the Steady drone of peace. There will be no greater sorrow Than watching you go -- Except for watching you grow old And tired here -- Clarity awaits Elsewhere." --Stephani Perry ------------------------------------------ "Anticipation -- It's a ticklish thing really, Quivering, exciting, waiting, Until it dies -- Killed by it's own self Lost through virtue of being there." --Dal Perry ------------------------------------------ "There may or may not be a God or gods; the Siblings do not concern themselves with proving or disproving such a thing. By definition, gods are more powerful than men, and thus quite able to fend for themselves without help." --Steve Perry ------------------------------------------ "Soon another test would come. He must be ready for it. So he sat, but it was not mindless meditation but mindful scheming that filled him. In a contest like this, there could be no second- place winner. To be second was to be last and to be last here was to be dead." --Steve Perry ------------------------------------------ "Humans suffer from self-centred notions as to the nature of life. Humans assume that alien life forms should conform to standards that match our own, including logic and morality. Even among humans, morality is ignored when expedient. Why should we expect more from an alien life form than we demand from ourselves?" --Steve Perry ------------------------------------------ "Time seemed to suspend itself, or cease altogether. Place faded away. There was only her self, the centre that endured through all times, all events, from the world, from its pain. Timeless, eternal..." --Lois Tilton ------------------------------------------ "No, now he didn't want to let himself get too close because he knew it wasn't going to last. Good stuff never lasted. Change would come and wipe it away, and what was the point? It hurt too much every time it was ripped away and he was getting tired of losing pieces of himself. Pretty soon there wouldn't be much left, just scraps of gristle and bone without feeling. He didn't need that." --Steve Perry ------------------------------------------ "Well. There was noting to be done for it. Things had happened as they did, time's arrow had yet to be reversed by humans, done was done. If a man spent his life looking over his shoulder at every possible branching of his path he could have taken, he would never accomplish anything. One must learn from history so as not to repeat it, but one must not waste one's energy or time worrying about what might have been. Sorry... but people die every day and the galaxy continues on quite well without them. Consider yourself lucky you are one of those as yet unselected by the Fates." --Steve Perry ------------------------------------------ "All mystical experience is coincidence; and vice versa, of course." --Tom Stoppard ------------------------------------------ "The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be sacrificed without end, without restraint, without respite until the consummation of the world, the extinction of evil, the death of death." --Joseph De Maistre ------------------------------------------ "Man is insatiable for power; he is infantile in his desires and, always discontented with what he has, loves only what he has not. People complain of the despotism of princes; they ought to complain of the despotism of man." --Joseph De Maistre ------------------------------------------ "All grandeur, all power, all subordination to authority rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears." --Joseph De Maistre ------------------------------------------ "Evil is... a moral entity and not a created one, an eternal and not a perishable entity: it existed before the world; it constituted the monstrous, the execrable being who was also to fashion such a hideous world. It will hence exist after the creatures which people this world." --Marquis De Sade ------------------------------------------ "But what is the greatest evil? If you are going to epitomize evil, what is it? Is it the bomb? The greatest evil that one has to fight constantly, every minute of the day until one dies, is the worst part of oneself." --Patrick McGoohan ------------------------------------------ "There is no explanation for evil. It must be looked upon as a necessary part of the order of the universe. To ignore it is childish, to bewail it senseless." --W. Somerset Maugham ------------------------------------------ "We are tainted by modern philosophy which has taught us that all is good, whereas evil has polluted everything and in a very real sense all is evil, since nothing is in its proper place." --Joseph De Maistre ------------------------------------------ "The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness." --Joseph Conrad ------------------------------------------ "L'eternit‚. C'est la mer ml‚e Au soleil." [Eternity. It is the sea mingled with the sun.] --Arthur Rimbaud ------------------------------------------ "Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present." --Ludwig Wittgenstein ------------------------------------------ "It is very comforting to believe that leaders who do terrible things are, in fact, mad. That way, all we have to do is make sure we don't put psychotics in high places and we've got the problem solved." --Tom Wolfe ------------------------------------------ "Follow me if I advance! Kill me if I retreat! Revenge me if I die!" --Ngo Dinh Diem ------------------------------------------ "The wise man who is not heeded is counted a fool, and the fool who proclaims the general folly first and loudest passes for a prophet and Fhrer, and sometimes it is luckily the other way round as well, or else mankind would long since have perished of stupidity." --Carl Jung ------------------------------------------ "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." --Lord Acton ------------------------------------------ "Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvellous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on." --Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. ------------------------------------------ "We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy." --Cyril Connolly ------------------------------------------ "Now blessings light on him that first invented this same sleep: it covers a man all over, thoughts and all, like a cloak; 'tis meat for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, heat for the cold, and cold for the hot. 'Tis the current coin that purchases all the pleasures of the world cheap; and the balance that sets the king and the shepherd, the fool and the wise-man even. There is only one thing, that I dislike in sleep; 'tis that it resembles death; there's very little difference between a man in his first sleep, and a man in his last sleep." --Miguel De Cervantes ------------------------------------------ "He is mad past recovery, but yet he has lucid intervals." --Miguel De Cervantes ------------------------------------------ "Our greatest foes, and whom we must chiefly combat, are within." --Miguel De Cervantes ------------------------------------------ "Researchers, with science as their authority, will be able to cut [animals] up, alive, into small pieces, drop them from a great height to see if they are shattered by the fall, or deprive them of sleep for sixteen days and nights continuously for the purposes of an iniquitous monograph... 'Animal trust, undeserved faith, when at last will you turn away from us? Shall we never tire of deceiving, betraying, tormenting animals before they cease to trust us?'" --Colette ------------------------------------------ "On this narrow planet, we have only the choice between two unknown worlds. One of them tempts us --ah! what a dream, to live in that! --the other stifles us at the first breath." --Colette ------------------------------------------ "Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what's known as infinity." --Jean Cocteau ------------------------------------------ "Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief." --C. S. Lewis ------------------------------------------ "Melancholy is at the bottom of everything, just as at the end of all rivers is the sea. Can it be otherwise in a world where nothing lasts, where all that we have loved or shall love must die? Is death, then, the secret of life? The gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or less closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the universe." --Henri-Frederic Amiel ------------------------------------------ "A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretence. No truth seems true. A simple morning's greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications... Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent." --Maya Angelou ------------------------------------------ "In love, unlike most other passions, the recollection of what you have had and lost is always better than what you can hope for in the future." --Stendhal ------------------------------------------ "Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit." --Henry B. Adams ------------------------------------------ "The fact that logic cannot satisfy us awakens an almost insatiable hunger for the irrational." --A. N. Wilson ------------------------------------------ "Logic is like the sword -- those who appeal to it, shall perish by it." --Samuel Butler ------------------------------------------ "Kill a man one is a murderer; kill a million, a conqueror; kill them all, a God." --Jean Rostand ------------------------------------------ "A bestial and violent man will go so far as to kill because he is under the influence of drink, exasperated, or driven by rage and alcohol. He is paltry. He does not know the pleasure of killing, the charity of bestowing death like a caress, of linking it with the play of the noble wild beasts: every cat, every tiger, embraces its prey and licks it even while it destroys it." --Colette ------------------------------------------ "You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded." --Ludwig Wittgenstein ------------------------------------------ "There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him." --Antonin Artaud ------------------------------------------ "I don't believe in evil, I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots." --Isak Dinesen ------------------------------------------ "It is an open question whether any behaviour based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly." --Margaret Mead ------------------------------------------ "Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination." --William Burroughs ------------------------------------------ "One of life's primal situations; the game of hide and seek. Oh, the delicious thrill of hiding while the others come looking for you, the delicious terror of being discovered, but what panic when, after a long search, the others abandon you! You mustn't hide too well. You mustn't be too good at the game. The player must never be bigger than the game itself." --Jean Baudrillard ------------------------------------------ "He is useless on top of the ground; he ought to be under it, inspiring the cabbages." --Mark Twain ------------------------------------------ "The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable; they are alarmed at this world, because this world is a very alarming place. They dislike being alone because it is verily and indeed an awful idea to be alone. Barbarians fear the unknown for the same reason that Agnostics worship it -- because it is a fact." --G. K. Chesterton ------------------------------------------ "Terror is as much a part of the concept of truth as runniness is of the concept of jam. We wouldn't like jam if it didn't, by its very nature, ooze. We wouldn't like truth if it wasn't sticky, if, from time to time, it didn't ooze blood." --Jean Baudrillard ------------------------------------------ "The mind can make Substance, and people planets of its own With beings brighter than have been, and give A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh." --Lord Byron ------------------------------------------ "I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial." --Charles Baudelaire ------------------------------------------ "Soul -- bound in my body My eyes are broken windows Go inside of me Awaiting Eternity." --Rose Chronicles ------------------------------------------ "Did you know your body's just a cavern for your soul? Souls will drift, the aimlessly adrift dwell on shores of unrest Where ocean rage will make its nest I feel strange." --Rose Chronicles ------------------------------------------ "If you believe in the light, it's because of obscurity, if you believe in happiness it's because of unhappiness, if you believe in God, then you have to believe in the devil." --Father X ------------------------------------------ "The path of excess leads to the tower of wisdom." --W. Blake ------------------------------------------ "It's cold outside, there's no kind of atmosphere... I'm all alone, More or less. Let me fly far away from here. Fun fun fun in the sun sun sun. I want to lie, shipwrecked and comatose, Drinking fresh mango juice. Goldfish shoals, nibbling at my toes. Fun fun fun in the sun sun sun. Fun fun fun in the sun sun sun." --from Red Dwarf ------------------------------------------ "I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." --Frank Herbert ------------------------------------------ "The game is never over, and the prize is never won. Broken doors, broken dreams, it's all the same thing. A door's purpose is to conceal the contents of a room, and dreams are the doors of the mind." --from Broken Doors ------------------------------------------ "The logic of a madman is a sane man's confusion." --Joe R. Lansdale ------------------------------------------ "She used to love jokes, painful ones. She loved hurting people. She thought it would lessen the hurt and loneliness she felt, but it never did." --S. Tepper ------------------------------------------ "My father always spoke that way. In the third person. He and she, as though we were characters in a drama, playing parts that had been written for us. Not as though we were real ourselves." --S. Tepper ------------------------------------------ "I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put if off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing." --George Orwell ------------------------------------------ "In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all." --George Orwell ------------------------------------------ "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows." --George Orwell ------------------------------------------ "The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right." --George Orwell ------------------------------------------ "Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious." --George Orwell ------------------------------------------ "Feeling screwed up at a screwed up time in a screwed up place does not necessarily make you screwed up." --from Pump Up The Volume ------------------------------------------ "Surviving [life] is the whole point. Quitting it will not make you strong. Surviving it will!" --from Pump Up The Volume ------------------------------------------ "You know what you have to do... Your job, your purpose is to get accepted, get a cute girlfriend, think up something great to do for the rest of your life. What if you're confused and can't imagine a career? What if you're funny looking and can't get a girlfriend? You see? No one wants to hear it. But the terrible secret is that being young is sometimes less fun than being dead." --from Pump Up The Volume ------------------------------------------ "We're all worried, we're all in pain. That comes with having eyes, having ears." --from Pump Up The Volume ------------------------------------------ "There's nothing to do anymore. Everything decent has been done. All the great themes have been used up, turned into theme parks. So I don't really find it exactly cheerful to be living in the middle of a totally exhausted decade where there's nothing to look forward to and no one to look up to." --from Pump Up The Volume ------------------------------------------ "Fate is the one thing that controls us all It is our master We live only to serve it It taunts us And it mocks us It finally becomes tired with us And leaves us as an empty shell." --Sanjay Singh ------------------------------------------ "The night is too dark, to walk with your eyes closed." --Peter Sintic ------------------------------------------ "Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die." ------------------------------------------ "If I am what I have and what I have is lost, who then am I?" --Erich Fromm ------------------------------------------ "Our own reality may be difficult for us to face with honesty, but it is the only reliable and reasonable place to begin." --Donald DeMarco ------------------------------------------ "Progress is a simple thing And all that it requires Is a certain moral blindness To the evil that transpires For if we look the other way When suffering makes its plea And concentrate on 'life's good things' With undivided energy." --Donald DeMarco ------------------------------------------ "Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'press on' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race." --Calvin Coolidge ------------------------------------------ "Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." --Susan Ertz ------------------------------------------ "Of all the people in the world, the best and the worst are drawn to a dead dog. Most turn away. Only the pure of heart can feel its pain. And somewhere in between the rest of us struggle." --from Twin Peaks ------------------------------------------ "Am I? Or am I so sane that you just blew your mind? ... Is it? Or is it so possible that your head is spinning like a top? ... Can it? Or is your entire world crumbling down all around you?" --from Seinfeld ------------------------------------------ "Do you feel like suicide? Is your conscience all right Does it plague you at night Do you feel good, feel good?" --Queen ------------------------------------------ "Chance makes a plaything of a man's life." --Seneca ------------------------------------------ "One man with a dream, at pleasure, Shall go forth and conquer a crown; And three with a new song's measure Can trample an empire down." --O'Shaughnessy ------------------------------------------ "People are strange. We're all morticians. Hey, what's on TV?" --Ric Ocasek ------------------------------------------ "The distance drew near, like a speck on a ball Where circular imprints stepped from the light And whispered a slogan invented by anyone. So they all went along and yelled to the heavens Or some place as good." --Ric Ocasek ------------------------------------------ "I know the argument friend. It's the great theory of history. I've heard it before. It says when things ain't good, instead of getting down and doing something about it, instead of changing your life, it's a hell of a lot easier to blame somebody else. And it just don't wash in my book." --from Talk Radio ------------------------------------------ "Who are you anyways? You audience. You're on me every night like a pack of wolves because you can't stand facing what you are and what you've made. Yes, the world is a terrible place. Yes, cancer and garbage disposals will get you. Yes, a war is coming. Yes, the world is shot to hell and you're all goners. Everything's screwed up and you like it that way, don't you? You're fascinated by the gory details. You're mesmerized by your own fear. You revel in floods, car accidents, unstoppable diseases. You're happiest when others are in pain. That's where I come in isn't it? I'm here to lead you by the hands through the dark forest of your own hatred and anger and humiliation. I'm providing a public service. You're so scared. You're like a little child under the covers, you're afraid of the bogeyman, but you can't live without him. Your fear, your own lives have become your entertainment. Next month millions of people are going to be listening to this show, and you have nothing to talk about. Marvellous technology is at our disposal, but instead of reaching up to new heights, we going to see how far down we can go. How deep into the muck we can immerse ourselves. What do you want to talk about? Baseball scores, your pet, orgasms? You're pathetic. I despise each and every one of you. You've got nothing, absolutely nothing. No brains, no power, no future, no hope, no god. The only thing you believe in is me. What are you if you don't have me? I'm not afraid see. I come in here every night, I make my case, I make my point, I say what I believe in. I tell you what you are. I have to I have no choice. You frighten me. I come in here every night. I tear into you, I abuse you, I insult you. You just keep coming back for more. What's wrong with you? Why do you keep calling? I don't want to hear anymore. Stop talking. Go away!" --from Talk Radio ------------------------------------------ "Colour makes a difference. Gender makes a difference. Ethnicity makes a difference. Acting as if they don't will create more problems than it will solve." --James Jones ------------------------------------------ "Between normality and abnormality there is not a gulf, but a fine and somewhat arbitrary line. Where we draw the line depends on how atypical, disturbing, maladaptive, and unjustifiable a person's behaviour is." --David G. Myers ------------------------------------------ "My life had come to a sudden stop. I was able to breathe, to eat, to drink, to sleep. I could not, indeed help doing so; but there was no real life in me." --Leo Tolstoy ------------------------------------------ "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." --Krishnamurti ------------------------------------------ "If a man is in a minority of one, we lock him up." --Oliver Wendell Holmes ------------------------------------------ "We are all mad at some time or another." --Battista Mantuanus ------------------------------------------ "If there were an invisible cat in that chair, the chair would look empty; but the chair does look empty, therefore there is an invisible cat in it." --C.S. Lewis ------------------------------------------ "You rode a fifteen year old boy straight into his grave, and the rest of us, straight to hell." --from Young Guns 2 ------------------------------------------ "I don't want to heal. I opened a wound, right here. It hurts like hell. I don't want it to get better and I don't want to pretend that everything's all right." --from Star Trek: The Next Generation ------------------------------------------ "Who do you think they're praying to? You ask me if I have a God complex? I am God!" --from Malice ------------------------------------------ "Generations to come it may be will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth." --Albert Einstein ------------------------------------------ "The flesh of man is an odd thing, It will wish for what it can't get, Ignorant of its luck and joy, Sees what is not there, Yet misses the treasures before it, It will doubt all, But is hopeful against all odds, And though it may seem self-destructive, I find a way to keep going." --Scott "Jesus" Watson ------------------------------------------ "If life is a role-playing game, I have a bone to pick with the Game Master." --Scott "Jesus" Watson ------------------------------------------ "What is shape without form; What is chaos without order; What is life without death; What is friendship without love; What isn't?" --Scott "Jesus" Watson ------------------------------------------ "Life is just a game, roll the dice, spin the wheel. Whatever comes up is what you get, if you take the game seriously you become obsessed by it, always trying to find a goal, but in the game of life, there is no colourful square that says finish. Only a select few will find it, and the rest will just wither away when they realize that their number never came up. Do not pass go, do not collect $200." --Sanjay Singh ------------------------------------------ "I managed to take a beautiful soul, a blooming flower, and with some terrible power that I didn't know I possessed... I withered the blossom and have perhaps destroyed one of the most precious things on the planet." ------------------------------------------ "There's a Mr. Hyde for every happy Jekyll face, a dark face on the other side of the mirror. The brain behind that face never heard of razors, prayers, or the logic of the universe. You turn the mirror sideways and see your face reflected with a sinister left-hand twist, half mad and half sane." --Stephen King ------------------------------------------ "You can go through your whole life telling yourself that life is logical, life is prosaic, life is sane. Above all sane. And I think it is. I've had a lot of time to think about that. And what I keep coming back to is [her] dying declaration: 'So you understand that when we increase the number of variables, the axioms themselves never change.'" --Stephen King ------------------------------------------ "If we ever knew exactly where the light was coming from, getting there would be easy." --Brian May ------------------------------------------ "Don't fear the weapon, fear the man." --from Rapid Fire ------------------------------------------ "Never ask for something you can't take away." --from Rapid Fire ------------------------------------------ "Talk the simple smile Such platonic eye How they drown in incomplete capacity. Strangest of them all When the feeling calls How we drown in stylistic audacity. Charge the common ground. Round and round and round We living in gravity Shake - we shake so hard How we laugh so loud When we reach We believe in eternity" --Yes ------------------------------------------ "I exploit you You exploit me I tell you one and one make three I'm every person you need to be I'm the cult of personality." --Living Colour ------------------------------------------ "Contact is all it takes to change your life, to lose your place in time. Contact, asleep or awake, Coming around you may wake up to find questions deep within your eyes, Things you never realized." --Van Halen ------------------------------------------ "Kill a few people and you're a murderer. Kill a million and you become a conqueror." --from Cliffhanger ------------------------------------------ "If you pick a truth and follow it blindly. It becomes a falsehood, and you a fanatic." ------------------------------------------ "There's nothing wrong with that girl that 50,000 volts wouldn't fix." --from Flying Blind ------------------------------------------ "Isn't it too bad that the great truths are all such lies?" --Stephen King ------------------------------------------ "Just go on dancing with me like this forever, and I'll never tire. We'll scrape our shoes on the stars and hang upside down from the moon." --Stephen King ------------------------------------------ "I used a lot of quotes when I was young. To make me sound mature, to make me feel like I wasn't the second-class entity that I'd always thought I was." --Gerard Jones ------------------------------------------ "Each of us is a tiny being, permitted to ride on the outermost skin of one of the smaller planets for a few dozen trips around the local star." --Carl Sagan/Ann Druyan ------------------------------------------ "Time doesn't heal any wounds, it just gives us more chances to make the same mistakes" --Sanjay Singh ------------------------------------------ "Now, weary traveller, Rest your head, For, just like me, You'll soon be dead." --from Red Dwarf ------------------------------------------ "I am a romantic, but I do put up a barrier around myself, so it is hard for people to get in and to know the real me. I fall in love much too quickly and that results in me getting badly hurt. The problem with love is that you lose control and that is a very vulnerable state to be in. I would love to really have a beautiful relationship with somebody, but it never seems to work out. What I would like most of all is to be in a state of blissful love." --Freddie Mercury ------------------------------------------ "I'm very vulnerable, but only when I really let people get near me. I build up a big defence. It happens automatically. I can be very over-emotional and that can be a very destructive trait in me." --Freddie Mercury ------------------------------------------ "I've taken your little wise cracks for a few years now, you hideous gargoyle, and if you ever open that gateway to hell you call a mouth in my direction again, I'll snap of your extremities like dead branches and feel them to you at gunpoint." --from Cheers ------------------------------------------ "Winter, summer, spring and fall It doesn't matter, death loves them all." --Sanjay Singh ------------------------------------------ "A man like me should carry his burdens alone. If he doesn't people get hurt." --Dennis O'Neil ------------------------------------------ "Hallowe'en is just an excuse for people that pretend that they can cope with reality to let their true chaotic nature shine through." --Sanjay Singh ------------------------------------------ "I feel not unlike a small boy, waking from a bad dream to find reality not much of an improvement." --John Byrne ------------------------------------------ "Too bad eternity has to last forever." --Jessica Conner ------------------------------------------ "Life was not meant to be observed, it was meant to be stolen." --from Covington Cross ------------------------------------------ "There are no ultimate ends. Only games and more games. The winner this round is the loser the next round. Only the game is eternal. And the game is always the same, if you never change the rules." --Gerard Jones ------------------------------------------ "...and so it was written that the pain and suffering will end. The only problem was that we weren't allowed to see the book." --Sanjay Singh ------------------------------------------ "I may not be smart, but then again, I'm not the one that blew up." --from Deadlock ------------------------------------------ "You non-conformists are all alike." --from Deadlock ------------------------------------------ "So come and get me... Let me... Get in that sinking feeling That says my heart is on an all time low... so... Don't expect me... To behave perfectly... And wear that sunny smile. My guess is I'm in for a cloudy and overcast. Don't try and stop me Because I'm heading for that stormy weather soon." --Queen ------------------------------------------ "I've paid my dues... Time after time... I've done my sentence But committed no crime... And bad mistakes I've made a few I've had my share of sand kicked in my face... But I've come through." --Queen ------------------------------------------ "Buddy you're a boy make a big noise Playing in the street, gonna be a big man some day You got mud on your face You big disgrace Kicking your can all over the place. Buddy you're a young man, hard man Shouting in the street, gonna take on the world some day You got blood on your face You big disgrace Waving your banner all over the place. Buddy you're an old man, poor man Pleading with your eyes, gonna make you some peace some day You got mud on your face You big disgrace Somebody gonna put you back into your place." --Queen ------------------------------------------ "Life would have no consequence, If all I saw made perfect sense. Life would not be magical, If all I saw was logical. So I question all I see, To try and solve the mystery. I've been living under delusion, Led astray by my confusion." --Frozen Ghost ------------------------------------------ "My eyes can only see and my ears can only hear Only my mind can conceive all that which I think I fear Imagination charms me but often leads me astray And like a labyrinth sometimes it's hard to see the right way." --Frozen Ghost ------------------------------------------ "Criticize, generalize everyone's strange Yet you choose to refuse to try and change And through your eyes you surmise what isn't there Because your dream isn't what it seems now you don't even care. Can't accept you reject changes around you You persist to resist anything new Rationalize with some lies your dated views The state you're in you got nothing to win but everything to lose." --Frozen Ghost ------------------------------------------ "I don't need to know your secret I don't need to know your vices I don't need to know your past All I need is to be needed." --Frozen Ghost ------------------------------------------ "Monday through Friday, the world's the same Busting their tails, and making a name Go to work, go to school, don't play the fool Pleasure's the payoff and the money's the tool. Sweating all week for a dollar's gain Living for the weekend to drown the pain. Life is more than what it seems Open your eyes and start to dream I scream Sunday." --One Bad Pig ------------------------------------------ "Preaching on a Sunday morning All the right words are said But does the congregation Know what's going through your head? Just a few distractions Some hell you can hide The mirror of your heart says 'You just can't let is slide.'" --One Bad Pig ------------------------------------------ "Connect the dots are hard to play when one has no eyeballs." --Mark "MEB" Baldock ------------------------------------------ "Modern art sucks, and if you think it takes talent, or has a 'deep meaning' which only select few can understand then you're an idiot." --Mark "MEB" Baldock ------------------------------------------ "They're not twinkies, they're Satan cakes." --Mark "MEB" Baldock ------------------------------------------ "I partially blame the modern day downfall of man and society on twinkies." --Mark "MEB" Baldock ------------------------------------------ "Ah, the sweetness of youth Grow old, yes But age with love And youth is yours forever." --Mark "MEB" Baldock ------------------------------------------ "Throughout all of the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years of your entire life, you can never get even one second back... live life well. This life will end, and you only get one shot at it. Keep in mind the possibility of the afterlife when choosing your moral pathways." --Mark "MEB" Baldock ------------------------------------------ "Everyone, without exception, in their own special little way, is a complete moron." --Mark "MEB" Baldock ------------------------------------------ "An alternate reality might be fun to visit sometime, but I wouldn't want a summer home there or anything." --Mark "MEB" Baldock ------------------------------------------ "Who's going to bake a cake for the lord?" --Brother Bob Tilton ------------------------------------------ "Invisible transfers, long distance calls Hollow laughter in marble halls Steps have been taken, a silent uproar Has unleashed the dogs of war You can't stop what has begun Signed, sealed, they deliver oblivion We all have a dark side, to say the least And dealing in death is the nature of the beast." --Pink Floyd ------------------------------------------ "Blind faith in your leaders or in anything will get you killed." --Bruce Springsteen ------------------------------------------ "Stranger than fiction Life is a mystery Nothing is turning, turning out The way that I planned it to be." --Airplay ------------------------------------------ "Humans to ashes People to dust It's all because In God we trust." --Sanjay Singh ------------------------------------------ "... and crawling on the planet's face, some insects called the human race. Lost in time, lost in space, and meaning." --from The Rocky Horror Picture Show ------------------------------------------ "Once again your mind explodes with a searing pain. A floodgate of memories bursts wide. Yet it is her face that keeps haunting you. Always her face. Who is she? Then things begin to crystallize. You remember your funeral. Begging and pleading for someone to release you from the darkness. You're not dead. You can't be. Then your feel her presence. Warm, caring, soothing. But somewhere deep inside she feels empty now. She has no reason. No meaning. No soul. But your soul lives. While her's is dying." --Todd McFarlane ------------------------------------------ "I remember there was someone. Someone to love. Someone to hate. And I was something. Something special. And proud of it. For a time. Then they turned on me. He turned on me. I remember... dying." --Todd McFarlane ------------------------------------------ "I don't belong. Not here. Not now. I have to get back there. The bet was rigged, he made me believe. Now there's darkness in my soul. I want to die... again. But I choose to come back, why?" --Todd McFarlane ------------------------------------------ "I'm confused I'm torn between a memory And an image of the future. All of the hurt I've caused All the hurt I can still do. I've tortured myself for years Playing 'what if' with my mind I can't cope with what has happened Or what will happen. My heart wants to go forward But my mind insists on lingering in the past. Life isn't fair. I can't decide." --Sanjay Singh ------------------------------------------ "There is no such thing as dusk, in the city." --2nu ------------------------------------------ "Love is a rare opportunity and when that love is somehow parted it's something deep down inside that wants just a reminder, a slice of memory, a possession." --2nu ------------------------------------------ "Slowly it seeps from my severed veins. Its passing leaving my body a cold, darkened shell. My essence, my being trapped within its liquid form. Silently it expands, enveloping the gleaming tiles. You reel from the horror, yet you are drawn closer. Your trembling flesh touches its red warmth. A chill quickly comes and clings to your soul. Its life trickles over your lips... your teeth... it fills you. And a smile overtakes you... and claims you as its own." ------------------------------------------ "Dreams are eraser dust I blow off my page. They fade into the emptiness, Another dark grey day. Dreams are only memories Of the plans I had back then. Dreams are eraser dust, And now I use a pen." --Kelli Schmidt ------------------------------------------ "The world is like an ice cream sundae, The world is like an ice cream sundae, The world is like an ice cream sundae, It's all going to melt someday." --One Bad Pig ------------------------------------------ "We have fired! They will be destroyed!" --from Star Trek: The Next Generation ------------------------------------------ "Good morning worm your honour The crown will plainly show The prisoner who now stands before you Was caught red handed showing feelings Showing feelings of an almost human nature Shame on him That will not do." --Pink Floyd ------------------------------------------ "I can feel one of my turns coming on I feel cold as a razor blade Tight as a tourniquet Dry as a funeral drum. Run to the bedroom, in the suitcase on the left You'll find my favourite axe Don't look so frightened This is just a passing phase First one of my bad days." --Pink Floyd ------------------------------------------ "The flames are all long gone But the pain lingers on Goodbye blue sky Goodbye blue sky Goodbye." --Pink Floyd ------------------------------------------ "Hush now baby and don't you cry Mama's gonna make all of your Nightmares come true Mama's gonna put all of her fears into you." --Pink Floyd ------------------------------------------ "When we grew up and went to school There were certain teachers who would Hurt the children anyway they could By pouring their derision Upon anything we did And exposing every weakness However carefully hidden by the kids But in the town it was well known When they got home at night, their fat and Psychopathic wives would thrash them Within inches of their lives." --Pink Floyd ------------------------------------------ "If you'd like to find out what's behind these cold eyes? You'll just have to claw your way through this disguise." --Pink Floyd ------------------------------------------ "Some times you're better off dead There's a gun in you hand and it's pointed at your head." --The Pet Shop Boys ------------------------------------------ "It's incredible how one insignificant human life can get in the way of even the simplest plans." --Sanjay Singh ------------------------------------------ "Oh cruel fate... why do you mock me?" --from The Simpsons ------------------------------------------ "A lot of people saying we'd be better off dead." --Neil Young ------------------------------------------ "It hurts! It throbs with pain, the like of which I never felt the half! Mortal flesh would scream again... yet demon spirit bids to laugh." --Alan Grant ------------------------------------------ "There be one place from which none may ever return--be he King, or Demon-Spawn, or the Lord of Hell himself. For lack of virtue has exiled them here... and only that virtue they lack can save them." --Chapter XIII, The Eternity Book ------------------------------------------ "From the first blood... I have been there. Quietly nudging you humans to seize the dark half of your so-called souls. No matter what history taught you--you delight in my suggestions. In fact most of you take direction rather well. Whenever there rises the slightest hope of stopping me I can always count on the human condition to exterminate that chance." --Jeph Lobe ------------------------------------------ "They gave me the whip as a souvenir. Insisted I take it. And I smiled, and said thank you, and kept telling myself that I should understand and cherish different lifestyles. I told myself and told myself, lying there in my cabin. All I could think of was the death and blood and pain. I couldn't sleep, couldn't eat. It hurt to live. I stood there in my cabin one night, with the voices of the dead screaming at me, and I grabbed the whip. The first place I hit was between my shoulder blades. Then my lower back, my face, all over, again and again and again until I was numb all over. And I haven't hurt since. Isn't that great? I learned how to overcome it." --Peter David ------------------------------------------ "I hear it's a good way to die, freezing to death. It's supposed to be very comfortable. You get all numb, and then you start to feel warm. This nice, relaxed feeling, and then you just go to sleep and you don't wake up. Very peaceful." --Peter David ------------------------------------------ "Opposites can attract, as in magnetism. Or explode, as in matter and antimatter." --Peter David ------------------------------------------ "I'll kill you. You think I won't? You think I give a damn whether you live or die?" --Peter David ------------------------------------------ "It was only a few centuries ago that if there was something unknown humans would automatically deal with it in one of three ways: kill it, pollute it, or try to make money from it. We've progressed far beyond that, but no matter how far we come, it only seems to indicate how much farther we have to go." --Peter David ------------------------------------------ "After you spend a day in a society who's prevailing philosophy is why make small problems when you can create a holocaust, then you must navigate your way home with a society who maintains the same philosophy in their driving." --2nu ------------------------------------------ "If you can't afford the price Of a fatal slip You better learn to dance To the master's whip." --Gowan ------------------------------------------ "Before you hand me over Before you read my sentence I'd like to say a few words Here in my own defence... Some people struggle daily They struggle with their conscience Till the end I have no guilt to haunt me I feel no wrong intent." --Gowan ------------------------------------------ "I've spent my life behind these steel bars I've paid my debt in time But being brought to justice That was my only crime. I don't regret a single action I'd do the same again These prison walls secure me And I'm numb to pain." --Gowan ------------------------------------------ "I stand accused before you I have no tears to cry And you will never break me Until the day I die." --Gowan ------------------------------------------ "Give it all you got until you're put out of your misery." --Aerosmith ------------------------------------------ "And the blind will lead the blind and all Those to scared to see I am afraid beware the masque And the truth it conceals." --Frozen Ghost ------------------------------------------ "How can you censor my thoughts? What is right, what is not? How is it you decide, What I should feel inside?" --Frozen Ghost ------------------------------------------ "And the things that come to those that wait may be the things left by those that got there first." --Steven Tyler ------------------------------------------ "You still don't get it, do you? He'll find her. That's what he does. All he does... You can't stop him. He'll wade through you, reach down her throat and pull her heart out." --from The Terminator ------------------------------------------ "I don't care how long it takes just give me something squishy." --Mark "MEB" Baldock ------------------------------------------ "Fear not, dear cousin. In madness there is great power." --from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves ------------------------------------------ "Hunting people is exciting." --William Branshaw ------------------------------------------ "Once in a stately passion I cried with desperate grief, 'O Lord, my heart is black with guile, Of sinners I am chief.'" --James Thomson ------------------------------------------ "The poisonous molecules of benzene arrived in the bone marrow in a crescendo. The foreign chemical surged with the blood and was carried between the narrow spicules of supporting bone into the farthest reaches of the delicate tissue. It was like a frenzied horde of barbarians descending into Rome. And the result was equally as disastrous." --Robin Cook ------------------------------------------ "Hope I die before I get old." --The Who ------------------------------------------ "It's a good day to die." --from Flatliners ------------------------------------------ "I know everything you fools can do. You can't push me into giving you the cure if I don't want to, and if you try, I'll give you a second smile just under your chin..." --Peter David ------------------------------------------ "I always look forward to the opportunity to chop off more heads so that I can earn more money." --Saeed Al Sayyaf ------------------------------------------ "Outside of the killings, we have one of the lowest crime rates in the country." --Marion Barry ------------------------------------------ "I'd like to see people, instead of spending so much time on the ethical problem, get after the problems that really affect the people of this country." --Richard Nixon ------------------------------------------ "I never got into fights with kids about whose dad is bigger and who can beat up who. What am I going to say? My dad can kill your dad when he's asleep?" --Michael Brunner, son of Charles Manson ------------------------------------------ "Modern society as we know it is doomed to a painful death." --from WKRP in Cincinatti ------------------------------------------ "It wasn't murder... it was a civic improvement." --from Dragnet ------------------------------------------ "We're all of us dying... from the moment we're born." --Peter David ------------------------------------------ "Vulnerabilities, my dear priest, are exploitable weaknesses." --from V: The Final Battle ------------------------------------------ "You're just as free as the leash you're on. You tug it too hard, and they'll hang you by it." --from V: The Final Battle ------------------------------------------ "Person man, person man Hit on the head with a frying pan Lives his life in a garbage can Person man Is he depressed or is he a mess? Does he feel totally worthless? Who ever came up with person man Degraded man, person man" --They Might Be Giants ------------------------------------------ "A bird spied a worm escaping into a poison apple. The apple was in a tree. The tree was in a forest. The forest was in the country. The country was in the planet. The planet was in the sky. If the bird ate the poison apple, the bird would die. But the bird wished to get the worm." --Jeph Loeb ------------------------------------------ "The struggle for life is the only struggle. If this is what you get for livin' on borrowed time... what good is living?" --Jeph Loeb ------------------------------------------ "After there is great trouble among mankind, a greater one is prepared. The great mover of the universe will renew time, rain, blood, thirst, famine, steel weapons and disease. In the heavens, a fire seen." --Nostradamus ------------------------------------------ "Despair kinda smells like burnt hair. Sounds great, but smells lousy. Now fear... fear you can taste! Let's see, fear kinda tastes like... like peaches, peaches covered with fresh bone marrow." --Matt Wagner ------------------------------------------ "If winning isn't important, why keep score?" --from Star Trek: The Next Generation ------------------------------------------ "Oh freddled gruntbuggly Thy micturations are to me As plurdled gabbleblotchits On a lurgid bee. Groop I implore thee My foonting turlingdromes And hooptiously drangle me With crinkly bindlewurdles. Or I will rend thee In the gobberwarts With my blurglecruncheon See if I don't!" --Douglas Adams ------------------------------------------ "That which does not kill us makes us stronger." --Friedrich Nietzsche ------------------------------------------ "Life is like a mop... and sometimes life gets full of dirt and crud and bugs and hair balls and stuff and you, you, you got to clean it out. You got to put it in here and rinse it off and start over again, and sometimes you know, a mop... a mop is not good enough you, you got to get down there like with a toothbrush, you know, and you get to really scrub to get it clean... you got to get it off, you got to really try to get it off... and if that doesn't work, if that doesn't work you can't give up. You got to stand right up you got to run to a window and say 'Hey these floors are dirty as hell and I'm not going to take it any more!'" --from UHF ------------------------------------------ "Hey Chico... the one thing no one's ever accused me of is being sane." --from Marked For Death ------------------------------------------ "One thought he was invincible, the other thought he could fly. They were both wrong." --from Marked For Death ------------------------------------------ "I wouldn't be too surprised if the man gave into temptation, grabbed her cash, did her in, and put her remains through the sausage grinder in the meat department." --from Dragnet ------------------------------------------ "It's the right thing to do and the tasty way to do it." --from a Quaker Oats commercial ------------------------------------------ "Sometimes I lay awake at night and hear voices Voices making me listen and obey 'I shall do as you command great spirits' Madness is just a day away." --Sanjay Singh ------------------------------------------ "I'm only laughing on the outside My smile is only skin deep If you could see inside I'm only crying You might join me for a weep." --from Batman ------------------------------------------ "You want to get nuts? Come on... let's get nuts." --from Batman ------------------------------------------ "I can't stand it... It's driving me sane." --Spike Jones ------------------------------------------ "Maybe in this mixed up, topsy turvy world of ours they should take all the 'sane' people off the streets and lock them up and let all the psychopaths out of the asylums to run the world." --from Airplane 2 ------------------------------------------ "Someone's in my fruit cellar..." --from Evil Dead 2 ------------------------------------------ "Walking, walking on the tight-rope of insanity Walking, walking on the verge of losing your mind." --The Box ------------------------------------------ "If gods are supposed to be immortal and all knowing, and one who is immortal is one who never dies... how can they know it all and still choose to live?" --Sanjay Singh ------------------------------------------ "Kind of get's you thinking, doesn't it?" --Tony "The Real Estate Man" Hudson ------------------------------------------ "I don't know where hell is... another dimension, perhaps, or another plane of reality. As for getting there... it's a choice between sinning and being tricked by demons! It's a plane of evil... despair... and magic of the foulest kind." --Alan Grant ------------------------------------------ "Demons don't play by the rules. They lie and they cheat and they stab in the back." --Alan Grant ------------------------------------------ "I only want to sleep... and never wake." --Alan Grant ------------------------------------------ "Blood is drawn! I am impressed--though my hell-spawned powers will heal it! Besides... next to giving pain my favourite sport's to feel it." --Alan Grant ------------------------------------------ "All I know is that you won't come back until they're all dead. 'Eternity.' Every last one of them. Every man. Every woman. Every child. Global massacre. I dream about that day. A planet of corpses." --Grant Morrison ------------------------------------------ "Down through circles and trenches. Down and down into the screaming rock and the molten flesh of hell. Down where lovers, who have promised never to part, are fused together in a tangle of shrieking flesh. Towering, selfless love turned into hate and madness. Down through infinite arctic wastes where people wander alone and naked and freezing, never reaching any destination. Through the streets of suffering cities where the atoms of the houses bleed and beg forgiveness. Where taps drip and fires don't light and hearts burn endlessly. Where men and women are made monstrously huge, bodies so big they cannot move. They can only scream and cry out as other doomed creatures burrow and build in their flesh. Down and down and down through the pointless senility of hell." --Grant Morrison ------------------------------------------ "Hell changes constantly but there are certain consistent landmarks which always stay in the same relation to one another." --Grant Morrison ------------------------------------------ "I won't tell you again! Don't look back! In hell you never look back!" --Grant Morrison ------------------------------------------ "I thought I could capture the stories of the city on paper. I thought I could write about the horrors of the city. Horror stories you see. I tell you I didn't have to look far for material. Everywhere I looked, there were stories hidden there in the dark corners... I wrote and still there were more... No one would publish them. 'Too horrible,' they said. 'Sick mind,' they said. I thought I could write about the horrors of the city but the horror is too big and it goes on forever." --Grant Morrison ------------------------------------------ "Anyone who hates dogs and kids can't be all bad." --W. C. Fields ------------------------------------------ "Immortality -- a fate worse than death." --Edgar A. Shoaff ------------------------------------------ "What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists?" --Woody Allen ------------------------------------------ "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; who substitute bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter." --Isaiah, 5:20 ------------------------------------------ "Life is pain, anyone who tells you differently is selling something." --from The Princess Bride ------------------------------------------ "Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die." --Oscar Wilde ------------------------------------------ "Sanity is an illness and rationality a disease." --Sanjay Singh ------------------------------------------ "We who are about to die salute you!" --from Spartacus ------------------------------------------ "Existence is within a single plane. Reality on another. When the two intersect chaos starts and the repercussions can reap havoc on what was once a peaceful society." --Sanjay Singh ------------------------------------------ "It doesn't go out of style! And you know why? Because it will always irritate parents! It's a completely fool-proof expression." --G. B. Trudeau ------------------------------------------ "Knowing the whims and wisdoms of Fate enables one to know so much more, but in the main, all one must do to understand mortals is to observe them from a distance for a few millennia. They're almost always the same, everywhere." --Arthur Byron Cover ------------------------------------------ "The wet fish flies over the multi-mooned purple haze skies of the cerebral vortex in every young boy's left hemispheric side of a pig's brain. (unless of course you place a slice of processed cheese on the wet brain of a young fish, in which case you would end up with a rather tasty water omelette.)" --Mark "MEB" Baldock ------------------------------------------ "If everything seems to be going well... You obviously don't know what the hell is going on!" ------------------------------------------ "He felt the hot impact of bullets. He heard the sound of chopping meat. He thought 'is that me?' ...and then he opened his eyes." --Grant Morrison ------------------------------------------ "It took hundreds of years and thousands of lives, but the Universe finally taught me it's one and only lesson. Existence is worthless." --Howard Weinstein ------------------------------------------ "Death is a part of life, each individual should be permitted the time to deal with it in his own chosen way." --Howard Weinstein ------------------------------------------ "The American Scream is the personification of the plague of madness sweeping the states. Only he's real." --Peter Milligan ------------------------------------------ "Once I kept my mind occupied by hallucinating. Now I can no longer do even this... Rain and time have washed away my imagination. The mud is caking my soul... And I come to realize it never existed. Have no memory. Am nothing... A blind and mindless mouth in the mud." --Peter Milligan ------------------------------------------ "Wizor told me I'd be sent to the area of madness, from where I'd take over a human body." --Peter Milligan ------------------------------------------ "There is an ancient legend which warns that, should we ever learn our true origin, our universe will instantly be destroyed." --Len Wein ------------------------------------------ "There is a theory which states that if ever for any reason anyone discovers what exactly the Universe is for and why it is here it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable." --Douglas Adams ------------------------------------------ "Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twanging instruments Will hum about mine ears..." --Keith Sharee ------------------------------------------ "To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility; it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. Oh vast gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death! Why was the living banished thither companionless, conscious? Why, if there is no Devil; nay, unless the Devil is your God?" --Thomas Carlyle ------------------------------------------ "When you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember there's always madness. Madness is the emergency exit." --Alan Moore ------------------------------------------ "I don't know why. You don't know why. Most likely God don't know why, either. It's just Government business, that's all." ------------------------------------------ "The world is full of Kings and Queens, Who blind your eyes and steal your dreams."