People are stupid: given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true.
Wizard's First Rule (The Sword of Truth), by Terry Goodkind

http://feeds.reference.com/click.phdo?i=a12f60e0ab3e6c00dc71b59e818c41d1

http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/archive/2009/11/15.html

agog: in eager desire.

In chaos there is fertility.
- The diary of Anais Nin, Vol.1

He couldn't stay still; he wanted to get up and busy himself with something, to choke back the fear rising in him, against which he felt quite powerless...

I think I could turn and live with animals, they're so placid and self contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the earth.

♥ Black: ...I aint a doubter. But I am a questioner.
White: What's the difference?
Black: Well, I think the questioner wants the truth. The doubter wants to be told there aint no such thing.

♥ Oh, you might say somethin about the other man's mama. That's a sensitive area, you might say. And he might lose it and come after your ass but when he done that it's like he's sayin that what you just got done tellin about his mama was true. It's like he sayin: You aint supposed to know that about my mama and you damn sure aint supposed to of told it and now I'm fixin to whip your ass.

♥ White: Well I still dont get it. Why not go someplace where you might be able to do some good?
Black: As opposed to someplace where god was needed.
White: Even God gives up at some point. There's no ministry in hell. That I ever heard of.

♥ Well now wait a minute. Just cause you dont like em dont mean you aint like em.

♥ I don't know, Professor. I try and go by what I see. The simplest things has got more to em than you can ever understand. Bunch of people standin around on a train platform of a mornin. Waitin to go to work. Been there a hundred times. A thousand maybe. It's just a train platform. Aint nothin else much you can say about it. But they might be one commuter waitin there on the edge of that platform that for him it's somethin else. It might even be the edge of the world. The edge of the universe. He's starin at the end of all tomorrows and he's drawin a shade over ever yesterday that ever was. So he's a different kind of commuter. He's worlds away from them everday travelers. Nothin to do with them at all.

♥ You need to listen. Or you need to believe what you hearin. The whole point of where this is goin - which you wanted to know - is that they aint no jews. Aint no whites. Aint no niggers. People of color. Aint none of that. At the deep bottom of the mine where the gold is at there aint none of that. There's just the pure ore. That forever thing. That you dont think is there. That thing that helps to keep folks nailed down to the platform when the Sunset Limited comes through. Even when they think they might want to get aboard. That thing that makes it possible to ladle out benediction upon the heads of strangers instead of curses. It's all the same thing. And it aint but one thing. Just one.

♥ Here's what I would say. I would say that the thing we are talkin about is Jesus, but it is Jesus understood as that gold at the bottom of the mine. He couldnt come down here and take the form of a man if that form was no done shaped to accommodate him. And if I said that there aint no way for Jesus to be ever a man without ever man bein Jesus then I believe that might be a pretty big heresy. But that's alright.

♥ White: I don't know. The Germans contributed a great deal to civilization. (Pause) Before Hitler.
Black: And then they contributed Hitler.

♥ The darker picture is always the correct one. When you read the history of the world you are reading a saga of bloodshed and greed and folly the import of which is impossible to ignore. And yet we imagine that the future will somehow be different. I've no idea why we are even still here but in all probability we will not be here much longer.

♥ Sometimes faith might just be a case of not havin nothin else left.

♥ What kind of pain we talkin about? I got to say that if it was grief that brought folks to suicide it'd be a full time job just to get em all in the ground come sundown. So I keep coming back to the same question. If it aint what you lost that is more than you can bear then maybe it's what you wont lose. What you'd rather die than to give up.

♥ You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesn't mean anything. You've become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left.

♥ I dont believe in God. Can you understand that? Look around you man. Cant you see? The clamor and din of those in torment has to be the sound most pleasing to his ear. And I loathe these discussions. The argument of the village atheist whose single passion is to revile endlessly that which he denies the existence of in the first place. Your fellowship is a fellowship of pain and nothing more. And if that pain was actually collective instead of simply reiterative then the sheer weight of it would drag the world from the walls of the universe and send it crashing and burning through whatever night it might yet be capable of engendering until it was not even ash. And justice? Brotherhood? Eternal life? Good god, man. Show me a religion that prepares one for death. For nothingness. There's a church I might enter. Yours prepares one only for more life. For dreams and illusions and lies. If you could banish the fear of death from men's hearts they wouldn't live a day. Who would want this nightmare if not for fear of the next? The shadow of the axe hangs over every joy. Every road ends in death. Or worse. Every friendship. Every love. Torment, betrayal, loss, suffering, pain, age, indignity, and hideous lingering illness. All with a single conclusion. For you and for every thing that you have chosen to care for. There's the true brotherhood. The true fellowship. And everyone is a member for life. You tell me that my brother is my salvation? My salvation? Well then damn him. Damn him in every shape and form and guise. Do I see myself in him? Yes. I do. And what I see sickens me.

~~The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy.

"Death. Yes, death. And none of them know, and none of them want to know, and none of them are sorry. They're having fun." (From beyond his door he heard the distant sound of voices and a musical ritornello.) "They don't care, but they'll die just like me. Idiocy. Sooner for me, later for them, but it will come. And they're happy. Mindless brutes!"

http://feeds.reference.com/click.phdo?i=09f0db55013ca9e46eae7db1474907ad

http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/archive/2009/11/14.html

quiescent: at rest; still; inactive.

I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was—I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.

Heart like the train station in Amsterdam
in the winter, even the birds listen to
the ting, ting, ting of time, blind. Time is black…

♥ Anyway, people who are always looking out for perfect strangers are very often people who wont look out for the ones they're supposed to look out for. In my opinion. If you're just doing what you're supposed to then you dont get to be a hero.

♥ Who knows? Maybe birthdays are dangerous. Like Christmas. Ornaments hanging from trees, wreaths from the doors, and bodies from the steampipes all over America.

♥ Black: ...But the point is I done tried the other way. And I dont mean chippied, neither. Runnin blindfold through the woods with the bit tween your teeth. Oh man. Didnt I try it though. If you can find a soul that give it a better shot than me I'd like to meet him. I surely would. And what do you reckon it got me?
White: I dont know. What did it get you?
Black: Death in life. That's what it got me.
White: Death in life.
Black: Yeah. Walkin around death. Too dead to even know enough to lay down.

♥ ... You want to help people that's in trouble you pretty much got to go where the trouble is at. You aint got a lot of choice.

♥ White: Let me ask you something.
Black: Ask it.
White: Why cant you people just accept it that some people dont even want to believe in God.
Black: I accept that.
White: You do?
Black: Sure I do. Meanin that I believe it to be a fact. I'm lookin at it ever day. I better accept it.
White: Then why cant you leave us alone?
Black: To do your own thing.
White: Yes.
Black: Hangin from them steampipes and all.
White: If that's what we want to do, yes.

♥ ...But the point of course is that the drunk's concern aint that he's goin to die from drinkin-which he is. It's that he's goin to run out of whiskey fore he gets a chance to do it.

♥ Belief aint like unbelief. If you a believer then you got to come finally to the well of belief itself and then you dont have to look no further. There aint no further. But the unbeliever has got a problem. He has set out to unravel the world, but everthing he can point to that aint true leaves two new things layin there. If God walked the earth when he got done makin it then when you get up in the mornin you get to put your feet on a real floor and you dont have to worry about where it come from. But if he didnt then you got to come up with a whole other description of what you even mean by real. And you got to judge everthing by that same light. If light it is. Includin yourself. One question fits all. So what do you think, Professor? Is you real?

~~The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy.

"We seem to have forgotten the dignity of the only instruments, among all our inventions, that can carry and make articulate the thoughts, the soul of man. Even when used without so high an intention, words may yet be innocent and make a pleasant noise in the world, like brooks on moss or stones, or the wind in trees. But their misuse perverts the divine. And we have now come to a pass where truthlessness is tolerated, and even expected in politics, diplomacy, advertisement, the education of children, and the privacy of marriage. The depth of our degradation of words may be measured by the surprise any newspaper editor would feel if his news were criticized merely for being untrue."
- Freya Stark

'The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.'

The world’s spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind’s muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance.

Clarissa has always been the most hard-hearted, and the one most prone to romance. She's endured teasing on the subject for more than thirty years; she decided long ago to give in and enjoy her own voluptuous, undisciplined responses, which, as Richard put it, tend to be as unkind and adoring as those of a particularly irritating, precocious child. She knows that a poet like Richard would move sternly through the same morning, editing it, dismissing incidental ugliness along with incidental beauty, seeking the economic and historical truth behind these old brick town houses, the austere stone complications of the Episcopal church and the thin middle-aged man walking his Jack Russell terrier (these are suddenly ubiquitous along Fifth Avenue, these feisty, bowlegged little dogs), while she, Clarissa, simply enjoys without reason the houses, the church, the man, and the dog. It's childish, she knows. It lacks edge. If she were to express it publicly (now, at her age), this love of hers would consign her to the realm of the duped and the simpleminded, Christians with acoustic guitars or wives who've agreed to be harmless in exchange for their keep. Still, this indiscriminate love feels entirely serious to her, as if everything in the world is part of a vast, inscrutable intention and has its own secret name, a name that cannot be conveyed in language but it simply the sight and the feel of the thing itself.

The Hours - Michael Cunningham

http://feeds.reference.com/click.phdo?i=d8504c18cc3bc52018904337e4c978f4

http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/archive/2009/11/13.html

carapace: a shell; a protective covering.

I don't know why I did it. But today I can recognize that events back then were part of a life-long pattern in which thinking and doing have either come together or failed to come together - I think, I reach a conclusion, I turn the conclusion into a decision, and then I discover that acting on the decision is something else entirely, and that doing so may proceed from the decision, but then it may not. Often enough in my life I have done things I had decided not to do. Something - whatever that may be - goes into action; "it" goes to the woman I don't want to see anymore; "it" makes the remark to the boss that costs me my head; "it" keeps on smoking although I have decided to quit, and then quits smoking just when I've accepted the fact that I'm a smoker and always will be. I don't mean to say that thinking and reaching decisions have no influence on behavior. But behavior does not merely enact whatever has already been thought through and decided. It has its own sources, and is my behavior, quite independently, just as my thoughts are my thoughts, and my decisions my decisions.

-- The Reader, Bernhard Schlink

hi everyone, i'm looking for quotes that relate to 'being in love' or appreciation of love or the anticipation... i don't know how to put it, but something along the lines of

richard siken's poem "you're in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won't tell you that he loves you..."

that whole feeling? i would greatly appreciate it. thanks everyone, this community inspires me <3

♥ Together these features lend the vague impression of a classical temple, and perhaps Acropolis of Athens were it not for the fact that the building is so caked in filth (soot, bird excrement, vehicle exhaust, industrial grime) that its neglect gives it away for what it is: an ordinary public-service building. Abused, ugly, useful.

♥ ...The bell tower, and there's nothing exceptional in this, is tall and thin. The baptistry, and this is unexceptional news too, is short and fat. I think of Father and Mother. I think of bell tower and the baptistry.

The bell tower looks down and loves the squat baptistry, the baptistry looks up and loves the beanpole tower. Now let me cast these buildings in the forthcoming event. Let me label the bell tower Linas-father, for if he was a building rather than a person he would indeed have been a tall, gangly type of structure. And let me label the baptistry Dallia-mother, for were she to be built out of limestone, she too would be only one storey in height, and she too would spread herself out in a horizontal fashion. So now, lower the light of day into a more romantic atmosphere, turn on the moon and see the beginnings of us, of Alva and Irva. Hear a faint rumbling as the bell tower pulls himself from his foundation in Cathedral Square, and lays himself down on top of the baptistry. And as the city vibrates with this act of love, to the happy groans of the bell tower and the baptistry: we begin. That's how it should have been marked, not by a little panting from two adolescents on the top entrance step of a building, but by the loud ecstatic bellowing of great architecture as it bangs away, building against building.

♥ Some men love power, some men love women, some men love boys, some men love cars, some men love firearms, some men love matchstick buildings; well, Father was one of those men who love stamps, a small breed admittedly but a breed nevertheless.

♥ This was true - soon Father would have as much time as he desired to linger over each new stamp as he went about the city, from house to house. But those stamps, Father would protest, had been franked; they were no longer the pure virgin stamps that could be found at the post office counters. Oh, he would sigh, there was something magical about those unused stamps arranged neatly in blocks, still with their serrated edges untorn and their glue unlicked. They were the nearest thing, he believed, to innocence.

♥ After a week of aching limbs father brought a wooden stool with him which ever after lived side by side with Mother's plastic chair in the twelfth counter booth. Perhaps that plastic chair and that wooden stool were slowly falling in love too - they seemed somehow to belong to each other. Perhaps this abandoned child and this half-orphan were instinctively drawn together by a profound yearning for absent people. Perhaps each immediately felt the want that surrounded the other, and instantly closed ranks for desperation for a whole.

♥ How the people loved the matchstick cathedral - more eager, it would seem, to relinquish their money if it might help to keep the matchstick model in good order, than to aid the vast and echoey religious warehouse itself. This is not uncommon; miniature things move people.

~~Alva & Irva by Edward Carey.

"There are never enough seats on the last train out of the station..."

- Hunter S. Thompson, Songs of the Doomed

I've been lurking for a long time, writing down all these quotes, and I thought I'd share some [finally].


"When you say words a lot, they don't mean anything. Or maybe they don't mean anything anyway...and we just think they do."
- Sandman: Brief Lives, Neil Gaiman

"'Tell him that we have fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam. Tell him that or I'll fucking kill you,' said the young man mildly, from the smoke."
- American Gods, Neil Gaiman

"One day, Buckley came home from the second grade with a story he'd written: 'Once upon a time there was a kid named Billy. He liked to explore. He saw a hole and went inside but he never came out. The End.'"
- The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold

Weeping too, perhaps,
when you remember how he loved and yet
wished to leave you: always both, at once.

(translated by Stephen Mitchell)

a day late but still lovely.

"I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.

So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.

What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.

And all music is."