on FRIENDS

Endurance of friendship does not depend upon ourselves but upon circumstance. But circumstance is not undetermined. [T. S. Eliot]

So long as we love, we serve; so long as we are loved by others I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend. [Robert Louis Stevenson]

Love him and keep him for thy friend, who, when all go away, will not forsake thee, nor suffer thee to perish at the last. [Thomas a Kempis]

Tyrants stand in awe of friends. [Plato]

We are most of us lonely in this world; you who have any who love you, cling to them and thank God. [William Makepeace Thackeray]

Wherever you are it is your own friends who make your world. [William James]

To let friendship die away by negligence and silence, is certainly not wise. It is voluntarily to throw away one of the greatest comforts on this weary pilgrimage. [Dr. Johnson]

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born. [Anais Nin]

on LOVE

…to some sentences of mine you said: "Yes, I know," before I had quite finished. I don't remember what I had said but I always remembered your saying: "Yes, I know." [Stephen Crane to Nellie Crouse]

Yes, yours, my love, is the right human face. [Edwin Muir]

I have spread my dreams under your feet: Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams. [William Butler Yeats]

on LIVING & DREAMING

I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after; and changed my ideas: they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind. [Emily Brontë]

That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet. [Emily Dickinson]

I have had prayers answered--most strangely so sometimes--but I think our heavenly Father's loving-kindness has been even more evident in what He has refused me. [Lewis Carroll]

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. [E.M. Forster]

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have gone ourselves. [E.M. Forster]

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us. [Helen Keller]

They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel. [Carl W. Buechner]

We shall find peace. We shall hear the angels. We shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds. [Chekov]

The average man votes below himself; he votes with half a mind or a hundredth part of one. A man ought to vote with the whole of himself, as he worships or gets married. A man ought to vote with his head and heart, his soul and stomach, his eye for faces and his ear for music; also (when sufficiently provoked) with his hands and feet. If he has ever seen a fine sunset, the crimson colour of it should creep into his vote...The question is not so much whether only a minority of the electorate votes. The point is that only a minority of the voter votes. [G. K. Chesterton]

For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream... [Van Gogh]

Resolve to take fate by the throat and shake the living out of her. [Louisa May Alcott]

It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment. What creates despair is the imagination, which pretends there is a future, and insists on predicting millions of moments, thousands of days, and so drains you that you cannot live the moment at hand. [Andre Dubus, A Father's Story]

If they give you ruled paper, write the other way. [Juan Ramon Jimenez]

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings. [Almansor]

When the legends die, the dream ends. When the dream ends, there is no more greatness. [Unknown]

Opportunity is very quiet sometimes. [Mrs. Lamkey]

It is my belief that the human heart hungers for constancy. [Elizabeth Elliot]

Why do musicians compose symphonies and poets write poems? They do it because life wouldn't have any meaning for them if they didn't. That's why I draw cartoons. It's my life. [Charles M. Schulz]

from LITERATURE

L. M. MONTGOMERY
"...If it's in you to climb you must--there are those who must lift their eyes to the hills--they can't breathe properly in the valleys. God help them if there's some weakness in them that prevents their climbing...This child has--what I have never had and would have made any sacrifice to have. But `the gods don't allow us to be in their debt'--she will pay for it--she will pay." (Emily of New Moon, 338)

"Tell Emily to go back to Shrewsbury and learn all she can...but to hide it and show her ankles." (Emily Climbs)

"My English and Scotch blood liked him...but the French didn't and I was none too sure about the Irish."
"If you don't watch out all the men will be grabbed...Beaus aren't found hanging on bushes..."
"If they were it would be all right...One needn't pick them then. Just let them hang." (Mistress Pat, 180-1)

"Keep your dream...as long as you can. A dream is an immortal thing. Time cannot kill it or age wither it. You may tire of reality but never of dreams."
"It hurts...to wake up, though..."
"The dreamer's joy is worth the dreamer's pain…" (Magic For Marigold, 266)

ERNEST HEMINGWAY
"The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one?"
"The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he's intelligent. He simply doesn't mention them."
"...It's hard to see inside the head of the brave."
"Yes. That's how they keep that way." (A Farewell to Arms, 139-40)

"I never think and yet when I begin to talk I say the things I have found out in my mind without thinking." (A Farewell to Arms, 179)

"I know that night is not the same as day: that all things are different, that the things of night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started...If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken place. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry." (A Farewell to Arms, 349)

"...we all need our heroes, and our dreams--real or false. And before you destroy someone else's dreams, if they have built their lives on them, you have to put something in their place. Before...not afterwards. Then it is too late. Being an iconoclast, destroying false idols--or those you think are false--is great fun, and gives you a wonderful feeling of moral superiority. But there is a high price to speaking the truth. You are free to say what you choose--and probably this has to be so, if there is to be any growth of ideas--but you are responsible for what happens because you speak it." (Highgate Rise, 329)

If you drive a man to choose between death of his body or corruption of his soul, how much are you also to blame if his choice is the wrong one? (Belgrave Square, 109)

"There is something uniquely precious about an old friendship. One has shared so much, seen the passage of time, how it has marked and changed us, the hopes realized and the hopes dashed, the work to fulfill the dreams, and the dreams that are crumbled and kept secret...One has laughed at the same things, and developed such an understanding because at times there is no need to speak. The knowledge is there simply because sharing has been so long a habit. One knows the best and worst, and there is no need to explain."
"No...No--I think it is the quality of friendship which matters, not its length. One can have an acquaintance with people all one's life, and never share a minute's total understanding, or meet a stranger and feel with her some tremendous experience so deep you can never afterwards tell anyone exactly how it was, and yet find, the moment your eyes meet, that she knows it as you do." (Belgrave Square, 205-6)

"...it is hardly worth fighting for something if you don't want it enough to care if you win or lose." (Hyde Park Headsman, 327)

We are incapable of keeping silent. It's so we won't think. It's so we won't hear. All the dead voices. They make a noise like wings. Like leaves. Like sand. Like leaves. Like ashes. Like leaves. (Waiting For Godot)

There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet. (Waiting For Godot)

I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent. (Endgame)

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something. (Major Barbara)

Genuine unselfishness is capable of anything. (Major Barbara)

I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them. (The Return of the King, 382)

Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil. (The Return of the King, 384)

from MOVIES

DREAM FOR AN INSOMNIAC
Anything less than mad passionate extraordinary love is a waste of time. There are too many mediocre things to deal with in life and love shouldn't be one of them.

THE REPLACEMENTS
Greatness, no matter how brief, sticks with a man.

Everyone should have legends; they allow us to dream.

Roads are for journeys, not destinations.

POETRY

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
[T. S. Eliot]

...Desire
Revives like ferns on a November fire.

It comes to only a memory.
We have too many memories,
And somehow I believe we die
Of things like these,
Loving what was not, might not be,
Nor is...

Like a pearl dropped in red dark wine,
Your pale face sank within my heart,
Not to be mine, yet always mine.
[Trumbull Stickney]

Voracities and Verities Sometimes are Interacting

I don't like diamonds;
the emerald's "grass-lamp glow" is better;
and unobtrusiveness is dazzling,
upon occasion.
Some kinds of gratitude are trying.

Poets, don't make a fuss;
the elephant's "crooked trumpet" "doth write";
and to a tiger-book I am reading -
I think you know the one -
I am under obligation.

One may be pardoned, yes I know
one may, for love undying.
[Marianne Moore]

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower,
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
[Robert Frost]

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unkown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.
[William Shakespeare]