Puck's Quote Board, page 20
Boasting 1613 quotes!
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I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live. They are what our friends tell us, in their pain and joy, their passion and rage, their yearning and their cry against injustice. We can sit all night with our friend while he talks about the end of his marriage, and what we finally get is a collection of stories about passion, tenderness, misunderstanding, sorrow, money; those hours and days and moments when he was absolutely married, whether he and his wife were screaming at each other, or sulking around the house, or making love. While his marriage was dying, he was also working; spending evenings with friends, rearing children; but those are other stories. Which is why, days after hearing a painful story by a friend, we see him and say: How are you? We know that by now he may have another story to tell, or he may be in the middle of one, and we hope it is joyful.
Speaker: Andre DubusSource: bird by birdPosted: 16 Aug 2009 at 1:02 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The evidence is in, and you are the verdict.
Speaker: AnonymousSource: bird by birdPosted: 16 Aug 2009 at 12:55 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
Speaker: Anne LamottSource: bird by birdPosted: 16 Aug 2009 at 12:53 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
We who are
your closest friends
feel the time
has come to tell you
that every Thursday
we have been meeting,
as a group,
to devise ways
to keep you
in perpetual uncertainty
frustration
discontent and
torture
by neither loving you
as much as you want
nor cutting you adrift.
Your analyst is
in on it,
plus your boyfriend
and your ex-husband;
and we have pledged
to disappoint you
as long as you need us.
In announcing our
association
we realize we have
placed in your hands
a possible antidote
against uncertainty
indeed against ourselves.
But since our Thursday nights
have brought us
to a community
of purpose
rare in itself
with you as
the natural center,
we feel hopeful you
will continue to make unreasonable
demands for affection
if not as a consequence
of your disastrous personality
then for the good of the collective.Speaker: Phillip LopateSource: bird by birdPosted: 16 Aug 2009 at 12:48 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Sometimes hidden from me
in daily custom and in trust,
so that I live by you unaware
as by the beating of my heart,Suddenly you flare in my sight,
a wild rose blooming at the edge
of thicket, grace and light
where yesterday was only shade,and once again I am blessed, choosing
again what I chose before.Speaker: Wendell BerrySource: bird by birdPosted: 16 Aug 2009 at 12:44 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
Speaker: Lewis CarrollPosted: 07 Aug 2009 at 1:38 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I think [Science is] the way of arriving at truth about the universe because, taken at its most general sense, science is disciplined inquiry. It’s an inquiry that formulates its questions carefully, and which tests them – and it does so in a way that is public and repeatable – which submits itself to review by other people (i.e. – challenge), and which is very open-minded; it’s prepared to accept that it may not arrive at answers but, if it does arrive at answers, those answers might generate new questions. But it’s prepared to put up with those. There’s something very special about the scientific mindset, which is that it is prepared to live with open-endedness.
Speaker: A.C. GraylingSource: http://whyscience.co.uk/Posted: 07 Aug 2009 at 7:04 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Definitions are not correct or incorrect, they are simply useful or useless, where usefulness is judged by the clarity of one’s attempts at communication.
Speaker: SeanPosted: 06 Aug 2009 at 9:17 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately.
Speaker: Michel de MontaignePosted: 05 Aug 2009 at 6:32 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
To be yourself you have to sometimes deal with feelings that only you are feeling.
Speaker: Scott BerkunPosted: 05 Aug 2009 at 3:49 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Speaker: Arthur ClarkePosted: 28 Jul 2009 at 6:51 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Seen from death, our close relations with our domestic animals no longer seem to be something minor to be taken for granted, given their everyday nature; ten years of a lifetime have crystallized in Leo, and I take the measure of how the ridiculous, superfluous cats who wander through our lives with all the placidity and indifference of an imbecile are in fact the guardians of life’s good and joyful moments, and of its happy web, even beneath the canopy of misfortune.
Speaker: Muriel BarberySource: the Elegance of the HedgehogPosted: 27 Jun 2009 at 1:14 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
So many quests, all these different worlds… Can we all be so similar yet live in such disparate worlds? Is it possible that we are all sharing the same frenetic agitation, even though we have not sprung from the same earth or the same blood and do not share the same ambition?
Speaker: Muriel BarberySource: the Elegance of the HedgehogPosted: 27 Jun 2009 at 1:10 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
This pause in time, within time… When did I first experience the exquisite sense of surrender that is possible only with another person? The peace of mind one experiences on one’s own, one’s certainty of self in the serenity of solitude, are nothing in comparison to the release and openness and fluency one shares with another, in close companionship.
Speaker: Muriel BarberySource: the Elegance of the HedgehogPosted: 27 Jun 2009 at 1:08 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It’s the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you see both their beauty and their death.
...Does this mean that this is how we must live our lives? Constantly poised between beauty and death, between movement and its disappearance?
Maybe that’s what being alive is all about: so we can track down those moments that are dying.Speaker: Muriel BarberySource: the Elegance of the HedgehogPosted: 27 Jun 2009 at 1:05 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
You do not take up philosophy the way you enter the seminary, with a credo as your sword and a single path as your destiny. Should you study Plato. Epicurus, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel or even Husserl? Esthetics, politics, morality, epistemology, metaphysics? Should you devote your time to teaching, to producing a body of work, to research, to Culture? It makes no difference. The only thing that matters is your intention: are you elevating thought and contributing to the common good, or rather joining the ranks in a field of study whose only purpose is its own perpetuation, and only function the self-reproduction of a sterile elite – for this turns the university into a sect.
Speaker: Muriel BarberySource: the Elegance of the HedgehogPosted: 27 Jun 2009 at 1:02 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
If you want to make a [university] career, take a marginal, exotic text (William Ockham’s 'Sum of Logic’) that is relatively unexplored, abuse its literal meaning by ascribing it to an intention that the author himself had not been aware of (because, as we all know, the unknown in conceptual matters is far more powerful than any conscious design), distort that meaning to the point where it resembles an original thesis (it is the concept of the absolute power of God that is at the basis of a logical analysis, the philosophical implications of which are ignored), burn all your icons while you’re at it (atheism, faith in Reason as opposed to the reason of faith, love of wisdom ad other bagatelles dear to the hearts of socialists), devote a year of your life to this unworthy little game at the expense of a collectivity whom you drag from their beds at seven in the morning, and send a courier to your research director.
Speaker: Muriel BarberySource: the Elegance of the HedgehogPosted: 27 Jun 2009 at 12:59 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I have always been fascinated by the abnegation with which we human beings are capable of devoting a great deal of energy to the quest for nothing and to the rehashing of useless and absurd ideas. I spoke with a young doctoral candidate in Greek patristics and wondered how so much youth could be squandered in the service of nothingness. When you consider that a primate’s major preoccupations are sex, territory and hierarchy, spending one’s time reflecting on the meaning of prayer for Augustine of Hippo seems a relatively futile exercise.
To be sure, there are those who will argue that mankind aspires to meaning beyond mere impulses. But I would counter that while this is certainly true (otherwise, what am I to do with literature?), it is also utterly false: meaning is merely another impulse, an impulse carried to the highest degree of achievement, in that it uses the most effective means – understanding – to attain its goals. For the quest for meaning abd beauty is hardly a sign that man has an elevated nature, that by leaving behind his animal impulses he will go on to find the justification of his existence in the enlightenment of the spirit: no, it is a primed weapon in the service of a trivial and material goal. And when the weapon becomes its own subject, this is the simple consequence of the specific neuronal wiring that distinguishes us from other animals; by allowing us to survive, the efficiency of intelligence also offers us the possibility of complexity without foundation, thought without usefulness, and beauty without purpose. It’s like a computer bug, a consequence without consequence of the subtlety of our cortex, a superfluous perversion making an utterly wasteful use of the means at our disposal.Speaker: Muriel BarberySource: the Elegance of the HedgehogPosted: 25 Jun 2009 at 8:12 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Those who seek eternity find solitude
Speaker: Muriel BarberySource: the Elegance of the HedgehogPosted: 25 Jun 2009 at 8:05 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Human longing! We cannot cease desiring, and this is our glory, and our doom. Desire! it carries us and crucifies us, delivers us every new day to a battlefield where, on the ever, the battle was lost; but in sunlight does it not look like a territory ripe for conquest, a place where – even though tomorrow we will die – we can build empires doomed to fade to dust, as if the knowledge we have of their imminent fall had absolutely no effect on our eagerness to build them now? We are filled with the energy of constantly wanting that which we cannot have, we are abandoned at dawn on a field littered with corpses, we are transported until our death by projects that are no sooner completed than they must be renewed. Yet how exhausting it is to be constantly desiring… We soon aspire to pleasure without the quest, to a blissful state without beginning or end, where beauty would no longer be an aim or a project but the very proof of our nature. And that state is Art.
Speaker: Muriel BarberySource: the Elegance of the HedgehogPosted: 25 Jun 2009 at 8:04 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment!