JJJJ fightin words JJJJ

 

 

 “Why don’t you write books people can read?"
Nora Joyce, to her husband, James

 

“Unless the medicine stuns you it won’t cure the disease.”

Zen proverb

 

 Let’s get clear here about what needs to be neglected.”

Brad Blanton

 

“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”
 Michelangelo

 

“Say one word with your mouth shut!”

Zen Saying

 

“Lying is done with words and also with silence.”

Adrienne Rich

 

“No one’s mouth is big enough to utter the whole thing”
Alan Watts

 

“I have lost my seven best friends, which is to say God has had mercy on me seven times without realizing it. He lent a friendship, took it from me, sent me another.”
Jean Cocteau

 

“No smile is as beautiful as the one that struggles through tears.”
Unknown

 

 “You can’t start worrying about what’s going to happen. You get spastic enough

 worrying about what’s happening now.” 

Lauren Bacall

 

“One real world is enough.”

 Santayana

 

 “The mind is a bullshit machine.”

Brad Blanton

 

“They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time

when it hardly mattered what exactly those beliefs were; they all fused into

a single stubbornness.”

Louise Erdrich
 

“Any idea, when firmly held, nurtured, and cultivated, will eventually

create its own reality.”

Paul Watzlawick

 

 “Maybe writers have too much imagination to contrive a romance.”

 trouble

 

 “A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”

Saul Bellow

 

“The basis of optimism is sheer terror.”

Oscar Wilde

 

 “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”

Abraham Maslow
 
“The quickest way to a man's heart is through his chest.”
Roseanne Barr

 

 “Pain sure brings out the best in people, doesn’t it?” 

Bob Dylan, 1971

 

 “Not doubt, certainty is what

drives one insane.”

Neitzshe

 

 “What you pursue, you don’t get. But what you allow to grow slowly in

 its own way, comes to you.”

  Rabbi Pinhas

 

“Somebody showed it to me, and I found it by myself.”

 Lew Welch

 

“Be not angry that you cannot make another what you wish them to
be; since you cannot make yourself what you wish to be.”
Thomas ã Kempis

 

“It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.”

Charles Baudelaire
 
“Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

 

“ I just heard rock-n-roll in my head so fucking loud that I couldn’t ignore it.”

Neil Young, 1988

 

“It is difficult

to get the news from poems

yet men die miserably every day

for lack

of what is found there.”

 William Carlos Williams

 

“What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.”

Mignon McLaughlin

 

“America is a mistake. A giant mistake.”

Sigmund Freud

 

“I found out Lennon was more accessible.”
Mark David Chapman

 

“Daisies are like sunshine to the ground.”
 Drew Barrymore

 

 “A poem is a city filled with streets and sewers

filled with saints, heroes, beggars, madmen,

filled with banality and booze,

filled with rain and thunder and periods of

drought, a poem is a city at war…”

Charles Bukowski

 

“A man has missed something if he has never woken up in an anonymous bed beside a face he’ll never see again, and if he has never left a brothel at dawn feeling like throwing himself into the river out of sheer disgust with life.”

 Flaubert

 

“It takes a long time to understand nothing”

Edward Dahlberg 

 

 “Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?”

Harold Pinter

 

“We think in generalities, but we live in detail.”

Alfred North Whitehead

 

 “Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals

 a chastening secret.”

Diane Ackerman
 
“A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.”

William S. Burroughs

 

 “Fraud and falsehood only dread examination. Truth invites it.”

  Thomas Cooper

 

“In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark

 wood where the straight way was lost.”

Dante: Divine Comedy, The

 

“You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll

discover will be yourself.”

Alan Alda
 
“I have no further use for America. I wouldn't go back there if
 Jesus Christ was President.”
Charlie Chaplin

 

“Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must

 go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.”

Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1959) page 418

 

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.” Sylvia Plath

 

 “God is becoming bitter, he envies man his mortality.”
Jacques Rigaut

 

“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an

open sewer and die”.

Mel Brooks

 

 “Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.”

 Ken Kesey


 The Zen Master said,

“Who binds you?”

The seeker of liberty said,

“No one binds me.”

The Zen Master said,

“Then why seek liberation?”

Zen Mondo

 

 “The more things happen to you the more you can’t tell or remember

even what they were. The contradictions cover such a range.

The talk would talk and go so far aslant.

You don’t want madhouse and the whole thing there.”

William Empson, Let It Go

 

  “We must endure our thoughts

all night, until

The bright obvious stands

motionless in the cold.”

Wallace Stevens

 

“At times I think and at times I am.”
Paul Valery

 

Q:

“If you find so much that is unworthy in the United States

then why do you live here?”

A:

“Why do men go to zoos?”

H.L. Mencken

 

“The most terrible thing is happy love, for then there is fear in everything.”

 Cosima Wagner

 

 “Act as if it were impossible to fail.”

Dorothea Brande

 

 “I was born when you kissed me. I died when you left me. I lived a few

 weeks while  you loved me.”

 Humphrey Bogart

 

“Americans are benevolently ignorant about Canada, while Canadians are malevolently

 well informed about the United States.”

 J. Bartlett Brebner

 

“Laughing at someone else is an excellent way of learning how to

laugh at oneself… questioning the seemingly absurd beliefs of another

is a good way of recognizing the… absurdity of one’s own cherished beliefs.” 

Gore Vidal 

 

“If we admit our depression openly and freely, those around us get from it an experience of freedom rather than the depression itself.”
 Rollo May

 

“Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.”
Brendan Francis

 

 “Housework, if you do it right, will kill you.”
Erma Bombeck

 

“…our ‘master status’ is the status with which we are most identified …the most viable status of a mental patient is being a mental patient, so that all other statuses of such a patient are ignored or interpreted in light of his master status. Therein lies the principal stigma that a mental patient must endure and that is undoubtedly responsible for at least some of the difficulty many mentally ill persons have in attempting to recover.”

 Gerhard Falk: Stigma, How We Treat Outsiders.

  

 “One out of four people in this country is mentally unbalanced. Think of your three closest friends; if they seem OK, then you're the one.”
Ann Landers

 

  “My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.”

Woody Allen

 

“There is no perfection…this is a broken world and we live with broken hearts and broken lives but still that is no alibi for anything. On the contrary, you have to stand up and say hallelujah under those circumstances.”

 Leonard Cohen, 1995

 

“Touch a face. Touch a hand. Say, “This is for you, this is

what I want you to wear.”
Estee Lauder

 

“Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.
D. H. Lawrence 

 

“In America sex is an obsession, in other parts of the world it is a fact.”

Marlene Dietrich
 
WAS it good for you?” what this means: “Better fuck next time.”

trouble

 

“A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.”

Jack London

 

 “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all
Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.”

John Keats, Ode On A Grecian Urn

 

“The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.”
William James

 

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those

 who matter don't mind.”
Dr. Seuss

 

 “When someone shows you what he is, BELIEVE it.”

Doctor  Maya  Angelou

 

“When you judge another, you do not define them, you define yourself.”
Doctor Wayne Dyer

 

“In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock

in the morning, day after day.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Crack-Up

 

“You have to show violence the way it is. If you don't show it realistically, then that's immoral and harmful. If you don't upset people, then that's obscenity.”

Roman Polanski
 

“The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.”
Ayn Rand

 

 “In the fight between you and the world, back the world.”
Franz Kafka
 
“Even the wisest men make fools of themselves about women, and even the most foolish women are wise about men.”

Theodore Reik

 

“Women are smarter than men because they listen.”

Phil Donahue

 

“All the reasons of man cannot outweigh a single feeling of a woman”

Voltaire

 

 “… it would be possible for him

 to abandon her where she is and joke about it

later, but he’s alone and the guilt can’t be

divided into small forgettable pieces;

 he’s finding out what it means

to be a man and how different it is

from the way that only hours ago he imagined it.”

 Alden Nowlan

 

“A man has no business to marry a woman who can’t make him miserable. It means

she can’t make him happy.”

 George Bernard Shaw

 

 “Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye.
Justice the founder of my fabric moved:
To rear me was the task of power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I shall endure.
All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”

Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy, The

 

“If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door.”
Milton Berle

 

“Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within."

James Baldwin 

 

“Why be a man when you can be a success?”

Bertolt Brecht

 

 “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the

 people he gave it to.”

Dorothy Parker

 

“The poet skims off the best of life and puts it in his work. That is why his work

 is beautiful and his life bad.”

 Tolstoy

 

 “If the copious writings of the mad are about one thing, it is above all the desire to cease

 to be misunderstood.” 

Roy Porter, Faber Book of Madness, The

  

 “There is a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.”

Oscar Levant


"There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
Jeremy S. Anderson  

 

“As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.”

Noam Chomsky, in a television interview

 

“I could prove God statistically.”

 George Gallup

 

“I've had my best times when trailing a Mainbocher evening gown across a

 sawdust  floor.  I've always loved high style in low company.”
Anita Loos

 

 “An ideal wife is one who remains

 faithful to you

but tries to be just as charming as if she weren’t.” 

Sacha Guitry

 

“I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these

seemingly fragile people

are the strong people really.”
Tennessee Williams

 

“Don't forget to be kind to strangers. For some who have done this have entertained angels without realizing it.”
Hebrews 13:2

 

“In the end, everything is a gag.”

Charlie Chaplin

 

 “Craving, not having, is the mother of a reckless giving of oneself.”
Eric Hoffer

 

 “The vast majority of women who pretend vaginal orgasms are faking it to “get the job.”

 Ti-Grace Atkinson

 

“First, it is impossible that you have no creative gift. Second, the only

way to make it live and increase is to use it.

Third, you cannot be sure that it is not a great gift.”

Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write

 

“Women are not bound to their names with any strong bond. When they marry they give up their own name without any sense of loss…The fundamental namelessness of the woman is simply a sign of her undifferentiated personality.”

Otto Weininger, 1906

 

“Those impaired with masculinity make a big deal out of insignificant issues b/c the smallest issue symbolizes control, who wins and who loses. Their embarrassing possessiveness of the remote control is a case in point. They may have virtually no control over the rest of their lives but these individuals will defend the remote control with their very existence b/c of the symbolic

 power it represents.”

Joseph Rock, Barry Duncan: Let’s face It: Men Are Assholes

 

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupery
 
“In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”
Leo Tolstoy
 
“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
E. B. White

 

 “I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.”

 Duke Ellington

 

“My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.”

Vladimir Nabokov

 

 “Don’t touch that. And stop your whining too.

Stop it. I mean it. You know I do.

If you don’t stop, I’ll give you fucking something

to cry about right here

and don’t you think I won’t either.

  So she did. She slapped him across the face.

And you could hear the snap of flesh against the flesh

halfway across the store. Then he wasn’t whining anymore.

Instead, he wept. His little body heaved and shivered and

wept.

He was seven or eight. She was maybe thirty.

Above her left breast, the pin said: Nurse’s Aid.”

 David Budbill

 

“Einstein suffered the fate of many other revolutionaries who boldly take

 the first steps on a new road but

shrink from the next steps.

Others may come along to pick up the journey because the road

 seems too sinister to its discoverer.”

 Werner Heisenberg

 

 “The greatest genius will never be worth much if he pretends to
draw exclusively from his own resources.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

 

“To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.”
Simone Weil

 

 “The best advice I can give a writer is: The Muse visits during the act
of composition, not before.”

Roger Ebert

 

 “…He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”

 Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

 

“Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and

 stumble from defeat to defeat.”

Ryszard Kapuscinski

 

“In order to commit suicide, one cannot write a meaningful note; conversely if one could

write a meaningful note, one would not have to commit suicide.” 

Edwin Shneidman, suicide expert

 

“I leave out the parts that people skip.”
Elmore Leonard, novelist

 

“Our thinking and our behaviour are always in anticipation of a response.

It is therefore fear-based.”
Deepak Chopra

 

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”

Edgar Allen Poe

 

 “I starve myself as to remember. Never to be a slug, that’s my ambition. Never to be a glutton of the fat. To live with a little hunger, a feeling, always hollow in my belly. Never to become one of them, absolutely never to become a grown-up.”

Billy Childish, My Fault

 

When he ran from a cop his transitions from accelerating walk to easy jog trot to brisk canter to headlong gallop to flogged-piston sprint were as distinct and as soberly in order as

 an automatic gearshift.”
James Agee

 

 “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale has had its effect.”

 Jonathan Swift

 

 “I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them.”
Henry James

 

  “People know what they do;

they frequently know why they do what they do;

but what they don’t know

 is what they do does.” 

Michel Foucault

 

 “You've got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body's sermon on how to behave.”

Billie Holiday

 

 "No one is listening until you make a mistake."
Anon.

  

“Water which is too pure has no fish.”

 Ts’ai Ken T’an

 

“The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad.”
Salvador Dali

 

"Accuse not nature, she hath done her part;
Do thou but thine, and be not diffident
Of wisdom, she deserts thee not, if thou
Dismiss not her, when most thou needest her nigh,
By attributing overmuch to things
Less excellent, as thou thyself perceivest."

John Milton, Paradise Lost

 

 “Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Breakfast of Champions

 

“Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't

 come out of your horn.”

Charlie Parker

 

  “People often take prejudice or habit for truth and in that case feel no discomfort, but if they once realize that their truth is nonsense, the game is up. From then onwards it is only by force that a man can be compelled to do what he considers absurd.”

 Alexander Herzen (circa 1850)

 

“The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear

 as if they belonged to one category."
Adolf Hitler

 

“Chess is as elaborate a waste of human  intelligence as you can find outside of

 an advertising agency.”
Raymond Chandler

 

 “As far as the remote control is concerned, this relatively new, technologically facilitated manifestation of masculinity has already reached epidemic proportions. Those impaired can now control the TV, VCR and stereo without moving. Some begin to believe in their own magical powers or omnipotence. In these tragic cases, they experience profound levels of anxiety at movie theatres, where the film and story unwind independent of their control.” Joseph Rock and Barry Duncan: Let’s Face It, Men Are Assholes

 

“I think my whole generation's mission is to kill the cliche.”
Beck

 

  “After we have a breakthrough and escape the mind jail, we quickly build ourselves another nest of beliefs to keep from going out of control. Today’s liberating insight becomes tomorrow’s jail. The truth is immediate, passing and temporary. The truth is always changing. How else could it be? The truth is the present.”

Brad Blanton

 

 “You need to claim the events of your life to make yourself yours.

When you truly possess all you have been and done, which may take some time,

you are fierce with reality.”

Fionda Maxwell

 

“People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one

 is that for which they will forsake the others.”

Marcel Proust

 

 “Though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are,

 we are,

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

 Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will,

To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.”

Alfed, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

 

"It’s no good trying to fool yourself about love. You can’t fall into it like a soft job, without dirtying up your hands. It takes muscle and guts. And if you can’t bear the thought of messing up your nice, clean soul, you’d better give up the whole idea of life, and become a saint. Because you’ll never make it as a human being. It’s either this world or the next.”

 John Osborne, Look Back in Anger

 

“By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll be happy, if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.”

 Socrates

 

“Love is not the dying moan of a distant violin - it's the triumphant twang of a bedspring.”
S. J. Perelman

 

“If I get married, I want to be very married.”
Audrey Hepburn

 

“Intelligence recognizes what has happened. Genius recognizes what will happen.”
John Ciardi

 

 “The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it's not without doubt but in spite of doubt.”
Rollo May

 

“Learn to ask for what you want... The worst people can do is not give you what

 you ask for—which is precisely where you were before you asked.”
Peter McWilliams

 

One day Chao-chou fell down in the snow, and called out “Help me up! Help me up!” A

 monk came and lay down beside him. Chao-chou got up and went away.

Zen Koan

 

"It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life, that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

“A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done.”
 Marge Piercy

 

 “The path to success is to take massive, determined action.”
Anthony Robbins

 

 “The best time I ever had with Joan Crawford was when I pushed her down the stairs in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
Bette Davis

 

 “It is said that London police can always distinguish among corpses fished out of the Thames, between those who drowned themselves because of unhappy love affairs and those drowned for debt. The fingers of the lovers are almost invariably lacerated by their attempts to save themselves by clinging to the piers of bridges. In contrast, the debtors apparently

 go down like slabs of concrete, without struggle and without afterthought.” 

A.   Alvarez

 

“The most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to say—because they were too obvious."
André Gide

 

“If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry.” 

Chekhov

 

 “Look, see the long shadow cast by the tree;

And flowers and people throw shadows on the earth:

What has no shadow has no strength to live.”

 Czeslaw Milosz

 

“Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.”
Ralph Ellison

 

 “To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.”

Quentin Crisp
         

 “Nice place for your spirit to visit, but only a soul can find a home here.”

Robin on troublewaits

 

“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.” 

Shakespeare

 

“Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.”
Jean Cocteau

 

 “Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to a job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it.”
Ellen Goodman

 

 “To be nobody but yourself - in a world which is doing its best,
night and day, to make you like everybody else -- means to fight the
hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.”
e.e. cummings

 

“Even a little dog can piss on a big building.”
Jim Hightower

 

 “Love is simple to understand if you haven’t got a mind soft and full of holes. It’s a crutch, that’s all, and there isn’t any one of us that doesn’t need a crutch.”

Norman Mailer

 

“Our Father which art in Heaven,

Stay there

 And we will stay on earth

Which is sometimes so pretty.”

Jaques Prevert

 

“No Comment”

anonymous suicide note: Or Not to Be

 

 “We are still mad about the mad. We still don’t understand them

and that lack of understanding makes us mean and arrogant, and makes us

mislead ourselves, and so we hurt them.”

David Cohen: Mad In America

 

“I wish they would only take me as I am.”
Vincent Van Gogh

 

“I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because, like Spinoza's God,

 it won't love us in return.”
Bertrand Russell

 

 Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult - once we truly understand and accept it - then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”
 M. Scott Peck

 

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness.”
Charles Dickens

 

 “Affluence separates people. Poverty knits 'em together. You got some sugar and I don't; I borrow some of yours. Next month you might not have any flour; well,

 I'll give you some of mine.”
Ray Charles

 

“I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn't poor, I was needy. They told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy, I was deprived. Then they told me underprivileged was overused. I was disadvantaged. I still don't have a dime.

But I have a great vocabulary.”
Jules Feiffer

 

 “When you're drowning, you don't say 'I would be incredibly pleased if someone would

have the foresight to notice me drowning and come and help me,' you just scream.”
John Lennon

 

“When peoples care for you and cry for you, they can straighten out your soul.”
Langston Hughes

 

 “The art of love ... is largely the art of persistence."

Albert Ellis

 

“Your best teacher is your last mistake.”

Ralph Nader

 

“Something we were withholding made us feel weak

until we found it was ourselves.”

Robert Frost

 

 “Insanity does not exist as such. The unorthodox forms of behavior that we view as insane in fact make up a language, the best one available for those whose suffering is too great to express itself in any other way. It is up to us to decipher that language.”

Bruno Bettelheim

 

“The concept…is perpetually hiding us all from the nature of the real.”

Joyce Cary 

 

“We cling to our own point of view, as though everything depended
on it. Yet our opinions have no permanence; like autumn and winter, they
gradually pass away.”
Chuang Tzu

 

 “Mediocre minds usually dismiss anything which reaches beyond their own understanding.”
Francois de La Rochefoucauld

 

 “The sad truth is that excellence makes people nervous.”
Shana Alexander

 

 “Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.”
Tom Robbins

 

“Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.”

 Ezra Pound

 

 “The task of the mentally ill is no different from the task of the others: to experience the world and tell the story.”

Susan Bauer

 

 There was only one catch and that was a Catch-22, which specified that concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were

 real and immediate

was the process of a rational mind.

 Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he

would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions.  Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to.”

 Joseph Heller: Catch-22

 

 “The storytelling always includes the audience, the listeners. In fact, a great deal of the story is believed to be inside the listener; the storyteller’s role is to

 draw the story out of the listeners.”

Leslie Marmon Silko

 

 “…For those who slip into the disguise of “normal” behavior b/c they cannot tolerate the tension caused by the contradiction between the reality imposed on them and their inner

 world, real feelings soon cease to exist. Instead, these people operate with ideas about

feelings, not with experiences of them… The “saner” the image of the identity they have adopted the more successfully they will be able to perform this manipulation. And manipulation it is, for their goal is not self-expression; instead they want to convince others that they act, think, and feel appropriately. These are the people whom I want to expose as the truly insane ones among us.”

 Arno Gruen: The Insanity of Normality

 

To understand is almost the opposite of existing.”

 Georges Poulet

 

“Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.”

Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992)

 

“Death ends a life, not a relationship.”
Jack Lemmon

 

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”
Muriel Rukeyser

 

 “So the lover must struggle for words.”

 T.S. Eliot

 

 “And though the tremble of a sigh

May tremble through the story,

For happy summer days gone by,

And vanish’d summer glory—

It shall not touch, with breath of bale,

The pleasure of our fairy-tale”.

Lewis Carrol: Through the Looking-Glass

 

 “I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened

of the old ones.”

John Cage

 

“If you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of the capitalist wilderness you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into this promised land if I could, because if I could lead you in, someone else could lead you out.”
Eugene V. Debs

 

“All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another.”

Anatole France

 

 “I don’t even know what street Canada is on.”

Al Capone

 

“The map is not the territory”

Korzbybski

 

 “A neurotic is a person who incessantly demands that life be other than it is.”

Brad Blanton

 

‘How to keep your boyfriend

 in line:  act crazy”

trouble

 

“I’ll be your mirror”

Lou Reed

 

“You’re doing what you were meant to do.

Call it what you want, you were born to be an artist.”

 

Basil, aromatic plant, author’s Tubman

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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