Favorite poems and quotations.

**ashlesha** · 04-28-2017, 06:29 PM

Originally Posted by Tearsofaclown

I don't know where to put this but I feel like such a jackass for my behavior yesterday. Almost too embarrassed to come back to the site. lol. I have some issues obviously. I started a fight from nothing. I don't dislike anyone on this forum. Like somebody asked me why I disliked the guy I was going off on. I don't. He was just in my range of fire at the time and somebody to take it out on. And I was drinking too. Which I should stop.

Anyway, I realize the problem is me and not others.

You'd be far from the first person to do this.
*looks in mirror*
Self awareness goes a long way.

"I was really interested in intention, or more specifically, in moral responsibility and how we conceive of ourselves versus how we actually behave. A lot of the characters engage in violence—physical, emotional, or otherwise—and then they run over options and try to find ways to justify him or herself. Why he did this. Why it was worthwhile, or necessary, or good. I’m interested in the ways that people find to keep their ego intact in these moments, or don’t. I’m interested in that gap between behavior and identity, between who we are or what we claim to be and what we actually do."
—THE RUMPUS INTERVIEW with Kea Wilson

**Tearsofaclown** · 04-28-2017, 07:00 PM

Originally Posted by lungs

You'd be far from the first person to do this.
*looks in mirror*
Self awareness goes a long way.

"I was really interested in intention, or more specifically, in moral responsibility and how we conceive of ourselves versus how we actually behave. A lot of the characters engage in violence—physical, emotional, or otherwise—and then they run over options and try to find ways to justify him or herself. Why he did this. Why it was worthwhile, or necessary, or good. I’m interested in the ways that people find to keep their ego intact in these moments, or don’t. I’m interested in that gap between behavior and identity, between who we are or what we claim to be and what we actually do."
—THE RUMPUS INTERVIEW with Kea Wilson

You got a dog? I love this paper by William James. A Certain Blindness in Human Beings. We have no idea what other people are about or mean but act like we do.

I love that. "Why are you sitting there lifeless when you could throw sticks for me to catch?" What queer disease comes over humans where they seem paralyzed and vacant of conscious life.

Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we are by a tie more intimate than most ties in this world; and yet, outside of that tie of friendly fondness, how insensible, each of us, to all that makes life significant for the other!—we to the rapture of bones under hedges, or smells of trees and lamp-posts, they to the delights of literature and art. As you sit reading the most moving romance you ever fell upon, what sort of a judge is your fox-terrier of your behavior? With all his good will toward you, the nature of your conduct is absolutely excluded from his comprehension. To sit there like a senseless statue, when you might be taking him to walk and throwing sticks for him to catch! What queer disease is this that comes over you every day, of holding things and staring at them like that for hours together, paralyzed of motion and vacant of all conscious life?

**Tearsofaclown** · 04-29-2017, 10:49 PM

About plagiarism and art... I always remember this quote from Salvador Dali's autobiography:

Eugenio d'Ors once made the profound observation that "everything that is not tradition is plagiarism." Everything that is not tradition is plagiarism, Salvador Dali repeats. The most exemplary case that one can give of this to a young student of the history of art is that of Perugino and Raphael. Raphael, while still a very young student, found himself almost without realizing it incorporating and possessing the whole tradition of his master, Perugino; drawing, charoscurro, matter, myth, subject, composition, architecture - all this was "given" to him. Hence he was a lord and master. He was free. He could work within such narrow limits that he could give his whole mind to doing it. If he decided to surpress a few columns or to add a few steps to the stairway; if he thought the head of the Madonna should lean forward a little more, that the shadow of the orbits of her eyes should have a more melancholy accent, with what luxury, what intensity, what liberty of invention he could do this.

The complete opposite is Picasso, as great as Raphael, but damned. Damned and condemned to eternal plagiarism; for having fought, broken and smashed tradition, his work has the dazzle of lightning and the anger of a slave. Like a slave he is chained hand and foot by the chains of his own inventions. Having reinvented everything, he is tyrannized by everything. In each of his works Picasso struggles like a convict; he is tyrannized, reduced to slavery by the drawing, the color, the perspective, the composition, by each of these things. Instead of leaning upon the immediate past which is their source, upon the "blood of reality" which is tradition, he must lean upon the "memory" of all that he has seen - plagiarism of the Etruscan vases, plagiarism of the Toulouse-Lautrec, plagiarism of Africa, plagiarism of Ingres. THE POVERTY OF REVOLUTION. Nothing is truer: "The more one tries to revolutionize, the more one does the same thing."

**Tearsofaclown** · 04-30-2017, 05:17 PM

Perry: Mr. Pear?
Arlo Pear: Yes.
Perry: How's it hanging?
Arlo Pear: How's what hanging?
Perry: Your dick.
Arlo Pear: It's hanging to the left.

lol

**Adam Strange** · 04-30-2017, 05:58 PM

Originally Posted by Tearsofaclown

Perry: Mr. Pear?
Arlo Pear: Yes.
Perry: How's it hanging?
Arlo Pear: How's what hanging?
Perry: Your dick.
Arlo Pear: It's hanging to the left.

lol

Arlo Pear must be right-handed.

**ashlesha** · 05-01-2017, 02:22 PM

**Tearsofaclown** · 05-01-2017, 06:53 PM

@lungs

The highest technique is to have no technique. My technique is a result of your technique; my movement is a result of your movement. A good JKD man does not oppose force or give way completely. He is pliable as a spring; he is the complement and not the opposition to his opponent’s strength. He has no technique; he makes his opponent’s technique his technique. He has no design; he makes opportunity his design. One should not respond to circumstance with artificial and ‘wooden’ prearrangement. Your action should be like the immediacy of a shadow adapting to its moving object. Your task is simply to complete the other half of the oneness spontaneously.

-Bruce Lee

"Question: What are your thoughts when facing an opponent?

Bruce: There is no opponent.

Question: Why is that?

Bruce: Because the word 'l' does not exist. A good fight should be like a small play...but played seriously. When the opponent expands, l contract. When he contracts, l expand. And when there is an opportunity... l do not hit...it hits all by itself (shows his fist)."

Great example of Se and Ni in some arrangement. I am not a subject of experience, I AM experience.

When we hold to the core, the opposite sides are the same if they are seen from the center of the moving circle. I do not experience; I am experience. I am not the subject of experience; I am that experience. I am awareness. Nothing else can be I or can exist.

**Aylen** · 05-02-2017, 08:54 PM

“A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.”

**ashlesha** · 05-02-2017, 09:37 PM

It’s not enough to say the heart wants what it wants. I think of the ravine, the side dark with pines where we lounged through summer days, waiting for something to happen; and of the nights, walking the long way home, the stars so close they seemed to crown us. Once, I asked for your favorite feeling. You said hunger. It felt true then. It was as if we took the bit and bridle from our mouths. From that moment I told myself it was the not yet that I wanted, the moving, the toward—

“Be it done unto me,” we used to say, hoping to be called by the right god. Isn’t that why we liked the story of how every two thousand years, a god descends. Leda’s pitiless swan. Then Gabriel announcing the new god and his kingdom of lambs—and now? What slouches

toward us? I think I see annunciations everywhere: blackbirds fall out of the sky, trees lift their feathery braches, a girl in an out-sized yellow halo speeds toward—
I picture her last moments, the pickup pulling faster, pulling rougher, kicking up its tracks in the slush: she’s nestled into that golden circle, sliding toward the edge of the closed-off field—

I am looking at the postcard of Anunciación, the one you sent from Córdoba in the spring. I taped it to the refrigerator next to the grocery list because I wanted to think of you, and because I liked its promise: a world where a girl has only to say yes and heaven opens. But now all I see is a bright innertube pillowing behind her head. All I see is a girl being crushed inside a halo that does not save her.

This is what it’s like to be alive without you here: some fall out of the world. I fall back into what I was. Days go by when I do nothing but underline the damp edge of myself.

What I want is what I’ve always wanted. What I want is to be changed.

Sometimes I half think I’m still a girl beside you—stretched out in the ravine or slouched in the church pews, looking up at the angel and girl in the colored glass, the ruby and sapphire bits lit up inside them. Our scene. All we did was slip from their halos—

Which is to say, mi corazón, drink up the sunlight you can and stop feeding the good fruit to the goat. Tell me you believe the world is made of more than all its stupid, stubborn, small refusals, that anything, everything is still possible. I wait for word here where the snow is falling, the solitaires are calling, and I am, as always, your M.

—Mary Szybist, “To Gabriela at the Donkey Sanctuary,” Incarnadine

**Pallas** · 05-02-2017, 11:24 PM

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

— William Ernest Henley, Invictus

**Tearsofaclown** · 05-03-2017, 04:50 PM

From the Chinese historical drama Red Cliff:

Liu Bei: "Brother!"
Zhu Ge Liang: "We are not building an alliance. We are making enemies. Viceroy Zhou, what is your opinion?"
Zhou Yu: "At this time of crisis, you can still weave straw sandals?"
Liu Bei: "This has been a habit of mine for years. We have walked a long way wearing these shoes."
Guan Yu: "Whenever our shoes are worn out, Big Brother weaves new ones with his own hands."
Zhou Yu: "It really is strong. I am surprised that such weak strands of grass, can become so strong after you weaved them together. You have a noble Lord, and brave generals. Generals Guan, Zhang and Zhao are all invincible warriors on the battlefield. An army high in spirits can fight an enemy ten times its size. We sons of Wu, must protect our homeland. We will also do our best. I have only one dream. A dream for all; that is for all of us to unite! United, no one can pull us apart!"

**Tearsofaclown** · 05-03-2017, 08:55 PM

@Cassandra

You will agree to this in general, for in spite of the Gospel, in spite of Quakerism, in spite of Tolstoy, you believe in fighting fire with fire, in shooting down usurpers, locking up thieves, and freezing out vagabonds and swindlers.

And yet you are sure, as I am sure, that were the world confined to these hard-headed, hard-hearted, and hard-fisted methods exclusively, were there no one prompt to help a brother first, and find out afterwards whether he were worthy; no one willing to drown his private wrongs in pity for the wronger's person ; no one ready to be duped many a time rather than live always on suspicion ; no one glad to treat individuals passionately and impulsively rather than by general rules of prudence; the world would be an infinitely worse place than it is now to live in. The tender grace, not of a day that is dead, but of a day yet to be born somehow, with the golden rule | grown natural, would be cut out from the perspective of our imaginations.

The saints, existing in this way, may, with their extravagances of human tenderness, be prophetic. Nay, innumerable times they have proved themselves prophetic. Treating those whom they met, in spite of the past, in spite of all appearances, as worthy, they have stimulated them to be worthy, miraculously transformed them by their radiant example and by the challenge of their expectation.

-William James

**Olimpia** · 05-04-2017, 10:12 AM

This reminded me of Supervision romance:

"They were like two magnets who couldn’t decide whether to attract or repel."
— Jay Asher

**Tearsofaclown** · 05-05-2017, 03:37 AM

"He also had a condition that was referred to as "granulated eyelids" and it caused him to blink more than usual as if he found creation slightly more than he could accept."

-The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

**Chae** · 05-05-2017, 05:32 PM

Classy but obliterating insults that made history. Captioned: "These glorious insults are from an era before the English language got boiled down to 4-letter words."

“He had delusions of adequacy.” - Walter Kerr

“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.” - Oscar Wilde

"I feel so miserable without you; it’s almost like having you here.” - Stephen Bishop

“He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.” - Billy Wilder

“I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.” - Clarence Darrow

“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” - William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway).

“I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.” - Mark Twain

"Never argue with stupid people. They drag you down to their level and beat you with experience." - Mark Twain

“Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I’ll waste no time reading it.” - Moses Hadas

“He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up.” - Paul Keating

“I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend… if you have one.” (George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill)
- “Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second… if there is one." (Winston Churchill, in response.)

“His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.” - Mae West

“I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.” - Groucho Marx

“He loves nature in spite of what it did to him.” - Forrest Tucker

**Cosmic Teapot** · 05-05-2017, 05:40 PM

An addition to your awesome post @Chae:

I Would Challenge You To a Battle of Wits, But I See You Are Unarmed - Unknown, earliest comparable word play written by Abby Buchanan Longstreet,1866

**Tearsofaclown** · 05-05-2017, 10:40 PM

The Jem'Hadar in Star Trek. They wake up dead every day and reclaim their lives. Life itself is victory.

Omet'iklan: I am First Omet'iklan, and I am dead. As of this moment, we are all dead. We go into battle to reclaim our lives. This we do gladly, for we are Jem'Hadar. Remember: victory is life.
Jem'Hadar: Victory is life!

**ApeironStella** · 05-05-2017, 10:45 PM

"You know something? I really hate people! They're selfish, ignorant, loud obnoxious pricks, with basically no redeeming qualities whatsoever. I mean really, look at all they've achieved! Genocide, global warming, reality TV, and just a never ending parade of failures and fuck ups! They are, without question, a complete write-off of a species, and how dare you make me care about them!" -Kirito, SAO Abridged

**Hope** · 05-06-2017, 12:49 AM

“The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.”

“I never learned anything at all in school and didn't read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old.”

“When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.”

-Stanley Kubrick

**Kalinoche buenanoche** · 05-06-2017, 02:15 PM

''Alone, they see me as their peer (I am). Alone, they see me as a subject of quiet delight (I am). Maybe I always was, and I forgot that too, left it behind in the wreckage of my performative self. New York exacts a tax of flesh, all the old dark gods do. Los Angeles is a new god, maybe, lemon trees and white-gold sun. Maybe it’s not a god at all, just light and grace until you are able reign over your own heart again. It was my first escape, and this is the city that will be my last, maybe, despite Brooklyn’s long, proud blip.''

**Tonatiuh** · 05-06-2017, 09:22 PM

You want to know how I did it? This is how I did it, Anton: I never saved anything for the swim back.

Vincent, Gattaca

**ApeironStella** · 05-06-2017, 09:46 PM

**Aylen** · 05-13-2017, 05:50 AM

**Pallas** · 05-14-2017, 04:01 AM

"The whole world is composed of opposites, and it derives its coherence from its incoherences."

— Gracián

**Pallas** · 05-14-2017, 04:03 AM

"If God had wanted me otherwise, He would have created me otherwise."

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

**Pallas** · 05-14-2017, 04:04 AM

Antonio Machado: Traveller, There Is No Path

Everything passes on and everything remains,
But our lot is to pass on,
To go on making paths,
Paths across the sea.

I never sought glory,
Nor to leave my song
In the memory of man;
I love those subtle worlds,
Weightless and graceful,
As bubbles of soap.

I like to watch as they paint themselves
In sunlight and scarlet, floating
Beneath the blue sky, trembling
Suddenly then popping…

I never sought glory.

Traveller, your footprints
Are the path and nothing more;
Traveller, there is no path,
The path is made by walking.

By walking the path is made
And when you look back
You'll see a road
Never to be trodden again.

Traveller, there is no path,
Only trails across the sea…

Some time past in that place
Where today the forests are dressed in barbs
A poet was heard to cry
"Traveller, there is no path,
The path is made by walking…"

Beat by beat, verse by verse…

The poet died far from home.
He lies beneath the dust of a neighbouring land.
As he walked away he was seen to weep.
"Traveller, there is no path,
The path is made by walking…"

Beat by beat, verse by verse…

When the goldfinch cannot sing,
When the poet is a pilgrim,
When prayer will do us no good.
"Traveller, there is no path,
The path is made by walking…"

Beat by beat, verse by verse.

**Chae** · 05-14-2017, 08:15 PM

"The world is a comedy to those that think; a tragedy to those who feel."
— Horace Walpole

**Pallas** · 05-15-2017, 11:05 PM

Originally Posted by Chae

"The world is a comedy to those that think; a tragedy to those who feel."
— Horace Walpole

Both = Waiting for Godot?

Originally Posted by Aristotle paraphrase

The major characters in a tragedy are not average. They are heroes, kings, and gods.
...
The major characters in a comedy are average people.

Feelers confirmed better than thinkers?

**Chae** · 05-17-2017, 02:52 PM

**ashlesha** · 05-17-2017, 09:43 PM

The alt-right:

"I believe that obsessive contemplation of our inhumanities can end up convincing us of the inevitability of our badness, and that we likely do ourselves a grave disservice by staying riveted by top-of-the-hour, ad nauseam “proof” that humans always have steadily pursued (and, the spurious logic goes, thus always will pursue) the bloody businesses of genocide, state-sponsored war, terrorism, and individual acts of sadism across space and time. I agree that if we don’t turn our attention away–or at least broaden our focus–we run the risk of floating further and further into the state described by Walter Benjamin as “an alienation that has reached such a degree that [mankind] can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”
maggie nelson, the art of cruelty: a reckoning

**Pallas** · 05-18-2017, 11:58 PM

'Observe, Chagatai, the protagonist of every work of fiction is Humanity, and the antagonist is God.'

— Ada Palmer

**ashlesha** · 05-19-2017, 01:46 AM

A year ago,
a lover ago, everywhere I looked I thought
there was no beauty I could again belong to.
And now I see that what is beautiful
is what precisely I have nothing to do with.
Like this jolie-laide duck skanking through
the reeds of Echo Park, his bill fat with stolen food.
I want to trust my own joy like that. More fully,
I mean, more thoughtlessly and sweet.
—Kyle Dacuyan, “I Am No Angeleno,”

**Hot Scalding Gayser** · 05-19-2017, 03:24 AM

"If God had wanted me otherwise, He would have created me otherwise."

As a Gay Man™ this warmed my heart. Thank you.

**ashlesha** · 05-20-2017, 02:58 PM

When we limit identity to consumer choices, it makes us more knowable to others in this datafied form than we are to ourselves. But being scored through our data also feeds the fantasy that we are essentially knowable, that we can know ourselves completely and totally, taking into account all the implications and ramifications of the various traits we possess. Algorithms promise a simple solution to the riddle of the self, should we want one. They promise the certainty that data alone suffices to make a self — just generate data and you are significant, a somebody, a unique identification number at the very least. One can accept the ready pleasure of consumerism rather than pursue the freedom of autonomy, which is always imperfect and requires boundless innovation in our techniques of resistance. We can learn the secret of ourselves, as long as we consent to be controlled.
Sick of Myself, Rob Horning.

**Pallas** · 05-20-2017, 08:34 PM

Originally Posted by Bullets

As a Gay Man™ this warmed my heart. Thank you.

I found this quote on a site talking about gay people too (not originally, but on one of the search results looking for a place to copy and paste from). Which just reminded me of "Goethe and Schiller are gay!" jokes. You're welcome.

**ashlesha** · 05-23-2017, 03:50 PM

All my life I have overheard, all my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we. A we is so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth. its hands are full of the crispest and most persuasive currency. Its mouth is full of received, repeating language. The we closes its ranks to protect the space inside it, where the air is different. It does not protect people. It protects its own shape.
—“Priestdaddy,” Patricia Lockwood

**Bertrand** · 05-23-2017, 06:20 PM

Originally Posted by lungs

what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we

what I like to call the "don't call me on my shit and I won't call you on yours" dynamic

i.e.: the road to perdition, ironically recast as some kind of "love"

I love that quote in general because it so accurately captures how it feels so good but at the same time causes so much harm. its just laziness. hence why "not caring" becomes some kind of virtue to these types. "I don't care, I don't care--I'm safe in my group"--proceeds to do evil shit to preserve that "safety." "I don't care, I don't care..." yeah, we know you don't

**ashlesha** · 05-24-2017, 09:50 PM

In general, I think we need to move away from the premise that being a good person is a fixed immutable characteristic and shift towards seeing being good as a practice. And it is a practice that we carry out by engaging with our imperfections. We need to shift towards thinking that being a good person is like being a clean person. Being a clean person is something you maintain and work on every day.We don’t assume ‘I am a clean person therefore I don’t need to brush my teeth.’ When someone suggests to us that we have something stuck in our teeth we don’t say to them ‘What do you mean I have something stuck in my teeth–but I’m a clean person?!’
Jay Smooth in his TED speech “how I learned to stop worrying and love discussing race”

**Kalinoche buenanoche** · 05-29-2017, 07:18 PM

''An “acting” connects the “there and then” with the “here and now”, the depth with the surface, the unconscious with the conscious, the implicit memory with the explicit memory, informing, forming and reforming the mind. They increase cognition and feeling determining a higher intelligence of the mind.''

**Pallas** · 06-04-2017, 04:17 AM

"You are quite right, I changed my mind and do no longer speak of “radical evil.” … It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never “radical,” that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is “thought-defying,” as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its “banality.” Only the good has depth that can be radical."

— Hannah Arendt

Thread: Favorite poems and quotations.

Thread Tools

Display

Posting Permissions