Sunday, September 13, 2009

The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place, but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.
-Dorothy Nevill

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know. --W.H. Auden

While you weren't listening, all our love songs became sad songs.

Your absence has gone through me like a needle; everything I do is stitched with its color. - W.S. Merwin

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous. ~ Henry Adams

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

"Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing there is a field. I'll meet you there."
- Rumi

You remember and dwell on all the things you've lost and ignore all the things you haven't. Because your scars are like stars. Yet the night stays perfectly black.


A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.

When I want my men to remember something important, to really make it stick, I give it to them double dirty. It may not sound nice to some bunch of little old ladies at an afternoon tea party, but it helps my soldiers to remember. You can't run an army without profanity; and it has to be eloquent profanity. An army without profanity couldn't fight its way out of a piss-soaked paper bag. ... As for the types of comments I make, sometimes I just, By God, get carried away with my own eloquence.
-George Patton

A moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions or motives, and of approving or disapproving of them.

A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterward.

If my heart was a compass, you’d be North

No one should have to dance backward all of their lives.

Yet, no matter how accurately you write it or mumble it under your breath, it won't change the way things stand between you. A poem, let alone a paragraph, is not a magic spell. And the only people who can write those stay in padded rooms, listening to music no one's ever played.

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
-Oscar Wilde

Every improvement in communication makes the bore more terrible.
- Frank Moore Colby

And you keep whispering the same story to yourself "I'll be unhappy now because that'll make me happy later. Because that's how a story works." So your happiness will always happen later, never now. Life isn't a story. Life is chaos.

"When you trust your point of view, that's when you start taking pictures." - Annie Leibovitz

Silence is often misinterpreted, but never misquoted.

When a woman behaves like a man, why doesn't she behave like a nice man? ~Edith Evans

A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.

You constantly look for a sign and when it's given to you and you don't like the answer, you call it a coincidence. There are no coincidences.

"Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share."
--Mark Z. Danielewski

In case you touch me by accident. In case you don't on purpose. More hope than heaven (more sadness than soil).

"Call no man foe, but never love a stranger." - Stella Benson

You could ink yourself until everyone knows all the things you love. You could wear uniforms that gave you all the authority in the world. Lose weight until there was nothing left. Paint the face. Suck in your gut.
But in the dark, stripped down to your bones, all that remains is you.

Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can love. - Zelda Fitzgerald

"Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling it to other people." - Spencer Johnston

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