a brilliant film

"You see, boys forget what their country means by just reading The Land of the Free in history books. Then they get to be men they forget even more. Liberty's too precious a thing to be buried in books, Miss Saunders. Men should hold it up in front of them every single day of their lives and say: I'm free to think and to speak. My ancestors couldn't, I can, and my children will. Boys ought to grow up remembering that."

"You could have no idea. You just have to see it for yourself. I don't know. The prairies and wind leaning on the tall grass and lazy streams down in the meadows, angry little midgets of water up in the mountains, cattle moving down the slope against the sun. Campfires and snowdrifts. You know, everybody ought to have some of that sometime in his life. My dad had the right idea. And it all worked out. He used to say to me: 'Son, don't miss the wonders that surround you because every tree, every rock, every anthill, every star is filled with the wonders of nature.' And he used to say to me: 'Have you ever noticed how grateful you are to see daylight again after coming through a long dark tunnel?' 'Well,' he'd say, 'Always try to see life around you as if you'd just come out of a tunnel.'"

"Great principles don't get lost once they come to light. They're right here; you just have to see them again!"

-Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

the quiet world

In an effort to get people to look
into each other's eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone
rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant

I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn't respond,
I know she's used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.

-Jeffery McDaniel

the secret

When you were sleeping on the sofa
I put my ear to your ear and listened
to the echo of your dreams.

That is the ocean I want to dive in,
merge with the bright fish,
plankton and pirate ships.

I walk up to people on the street that kind of look like you
and ask them the questions I would ask you.

Can we sit on a rooftop and watch stars dissolve into smoke
rising from a chimney?
Can I swing like Tarzan in the jungle of your breathing?

I don't wish I was in your arms,
I just wish I was peddling a bicycle
toward your arms.

-Jeffery McDaniel

book 2

"There is no reason why because it is dark you should look at things differently from when it is light!"

"Enjoying living was learning to get your money's worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money's worth. The world was a good place to buy in. It seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I thought, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I've had."

-Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises

more

"Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now,was and is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure."

"And blessed are those whose blood and judgment are so well commingled, that they are not a pipe for Fortune’s finger to sound what stop she please. Give me that man that is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him in my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart, as I do thee."

"That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat, of habits devil, is angel yet in this: that to the use of actions fair and good he likewise gives a frock or livery that aptly is put on."

"I must be cruel only to be kind."

"O, 'tis most sweet when in one line two crafts directly meet."

"Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service—two dishes, but to one table."

"What is a man if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more. Sure, he that made us with such large discourse, looking before and after, gave us not that capability and godlike reason to fust in us unused."

"This nothing's more than matter."

"I know love is begun by time, and that I see, in passages of proof, time qualifies the spark and fire of it. There lives within the very flame of love a kind of wick or snuff that will abate it. And nothing is at a like goodness still. For goodness, growing to a pleurisy, dies in his own too-much."

Shakespeare: Hamlet

acts 1 and 2

"Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice."

"O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!" "And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

"The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right."

"Though this be madness, yet there is method in it."

"There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so."

"I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises, and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air—look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire—why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

"I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw."

"Is it not monstrous that this player here, but in a fiction, in a dream of passion, could force his soul to his own conceit that from her working all his visage wanned, tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect, a broken voice, and his whole function suiting with forms to his conceit? And all for nothing!"

-Hamlet: Shakespeare

so true

"One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon-instead of enjoying the roses blooming outside our windows today."
— Dale Carnegie

book 1

"You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There's nothing to that."

"It's very funny. And it's a lot of fun, too, to be in love...it's an enjoyable feeling. No, she said. I think it's hell on earth. It's good to see each other. No, I don't think it is. Don't you want to? I have to."

"Probably I never would have had any trouble if I hadn't run into Brett when they shipped me to England. I suppose she only wanted what she couldn't have. Well, people were that way. To hell with people. The Catholic Church had an awfully good way of handling all that. Good advice, anyway. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it."

"I lay awake thinking and my mind jumping around. Then I couldn't keep away from it, and I started to think about Brett and all the rest of it went away. I was thinking about Brett and my mind stopped jumping around and started to go in sort of smooth waves. Then all of a sudden I started to cry. Then after a while it was better and I lay in bed and listened to the heavy trams go by and way down the street, and then I went to sleep."

"It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing."

"There are people to whom you could not say insulting things. They give you a feeling that the world would be destroyed, would actually be destroyed before your eyes, if you said certain things."

-Ernest Hemmingway: The Sun Also Rises

eternal cycle

"One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever...The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose… The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to its circuits...All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come thither they return again."

– Ecclesiastes

Mad Girl's Love Song

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"

-Sylvia Plath

cynicism for the soul

"Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love."

— Neil Gaiman

two

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.
_____________________________________________________

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep.

-Rumi

wow

“As a musician I guess the only thing I would ask from a listener is to put the CD in, close your eyes and forget about all the peripherals. I guess that's a dream that may not happen in my lifetime, but I listen to music from all sorts of people and I think there is an open-minded individual who will be able to listen to music of all types.”

"And so the stage of the modern world is set. Now lets meet the cast. We are first introduced to an ordinary citizen, perhaps much like yourself. He starts his day just like you. After washing his face, he has a look in the mirror, a quick bowl of cereal and then he's off to work. Fighting the traffic, he's sick of his current state of being, he's tired of living just to exist. No missing gears. Incomplete. Incomplete! We are incomplete on our own. We are the missing people when we live inside of ourselves and inside of our doubts. There must be a loss of 'incompleteness' in the process of becoming whole."

-Jonathan Foreman

sage

"So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they're busy doing things they think are important. This is because they're chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning."

"The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in." His voice dropped to a whisper. "Let it come in. We think we don't deserve love, we think if we let it in we'll become too soft. But a wise man named Levine said it right. He said, 'Love is the only rational act.'" He repeated it carefully, pausing for effect. "'Love is the only rational act.'"

"Why are we embarrassed by silence? What comfort do we find in all the noise?"

"I thought about all the people I knew who spent many of their waking hours feeling sorry for themselves. How useful it would be to put a daily limit on self-pity. Just a few tearful minutes, then on with the day."

"'You see,' he says to the girl, 'you closed your eyes. That was the difference. Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel. And if you are ever going to have people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them, too--even when you're in the dark. Even when you're falling.'"

-Tuesday's with Morrie