quotation

Overheard

"Elephants are generally drawn smaller than life size, but a flea always larger." -Jonathan Swift
"It was pleasant to take lunch and commune with the great silent, hollow house, and it was enough for us just to keep it clean." -Julio Cortazar, "House Taken Over"
Jim Gardner calls his informal critique of Lerdahl's "Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems," "Angorative Conceits in Pompous Suctional Cisterns"
from Mallarme's Quant au livre: "Beneath the text, a tune or song directs the reading from here to there by way of a motif borne on invisible devices and appendages."
Also Mallarme: "Silence, sole luxury after rimes."
From Harold Rosenberg, Community, Critics, Culture: "Realism is one of 57 varieties of decoration. -Hindu proverb"
"Thus the mere position conquers, be it that of warriors or of sentences." -Jean Paul, quoted by Freud (Wit & its R. to the U.)
"Fossilization is the act of metaphor magnified to a global strategy." -Steve McCaffery
by Nek Chand
"The impression was one of frenzied rage combined with unbelievable patience." from Stansilaw Lem, The Invincible
"He's guilty as hell." -Welles on how Anthony Perkins should play K., in The Trial
"One must forego the self to attain total spiritual creaminess." -Jim Carey
"He chews more than he bites off." -William on Henry James (was actually Henry Adams' wife)

Robert Walser, to a literary friend upon checking himself into an asylum: "I am not here to write, but to be mad."
Music by Stadelman: "It's Not Your Salvation"
"Men 12. mai var fru Albright paa CBS televisjon. Leslie Stahl, intervjueren, spurte: 'Vi har hoert at en halv million barn har doedd. Jeg sikter til at det er flere enn de doede i Hiroshima. Og kan De si meg om prisen er verd det?' Til verdens overraskelse svarte fru Albright: 'Jeg tror dette er et meget tungt valg, men prisen, vi tror prisen er verd det.'" -Grandma Hanson
Idea for a libretto: "The Death of Eng"
"[It] is an attachment to what lies outside the fantasy mechanism, and not a scrutiny of the mechanism itself, which liberates." -Iris Murdoch
"It was like he was excited by being bored." -Conor McPherson

"When the vrajavasis say the word "matsara," they do not mean "envy", but "my lake". When they say "khala", they do not mean "demon", but "a woman's sash". When they say "mala", they do not mean "defect", but "gentle and delicate". In this way they never speak anything unpleasant, but everything they say is pleasing and auspicious." -Srila Visvanatha Cakravarti; translated by Kushakrata Dasa
That reasoning is what Italians call "dietrologia," the art of finding dark, ulterior motives behind the most obvious decisions. -Alessandra Stanley
a page by Robert Grenier
"The theme is as it may prove
asleep, unrecognized
all of a piece, alone
in a wind that does not move the others."
W.C. Williams, Paterson
"pachinko poetics" -from Hanjo Berressem on Mason & Dixon
"Who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand?" -Murphy, Samuel Beckett
"What doesn't kill you makes you taller." -js

Outside, the company area broiled slowly under the sun.
At half past five in the afternoon Dennis Flange was still entertaining the garbage man.
Downstairs, Meatball Mulligan's lease-breaking party was moving into its 40th hour.
As the afternoon progressed, yellow clouds began to gather over the Place Mohammed Ali, casting a tendril or two back toward the Libyan desert.
Outside it was raining, the first rain of October, end of haying season and the fall's brilliance...

Chapter 1 has been suspended in a warehouse of textiles for 1000th of a second.
The route passes through air, in spite of a misreading. I speak to the horizon of a fixed point.
The dying son in a book holds back verbalization.
We learnt the original author, & we learnt application of his method easily and fast.
"Don't let your imagination be crushed by life as a whole. Don't try to picture everything bad that could possibly happen. Stick with the situation at hand, and ask, "Why is this so unbearable? Why can't I endure it?" You'll be embarassed to answer.
Then remind yourself that past and future have no power over you. Only the present- and that can be minimized. Just mark off its limits. And if your mind tries to claim it can't hold out against that... well, then, heap shame upon it."
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, translated by Gregory Hays
"For Skies grow thick with aviating Swine,
Ere men pass up the chance to draw a Line"
-Timothy Tox
"We should learn to live more on staircases. But how?" -Georges Perec
"You get the Timothy Leary you deserve." -Timothy Leary
"I'm not a pedant, in the strict sense of the word." -Richard Blundell
"After forty, a man is responsible for his own face." -Camus

Pascal: "I had a thought. I have forgotten it. In its place I write that I've forgotten it."
"A masterpiece: a superb machine for measuring the distance and height between a brief enlightenment and a very long build-up; between a lucky hit and myriads of indifferent results; between an "I" artificially raised to its highest power and an "I" at zero; between all that must go to the making of a work and what is "given" in the twinkling of an eye, at the merest touch.
Perfection, purity, depth, delight, an ecstasy that gathers strength out of itself."
"Many a poet is like a man roaming the wide world in a fatiguing, frenzied quest for rocks which by some freak of nature are shaped like human forms."
"A work of art means sacrifices. The great thing is to decide what shall be sacrificed; to find out who, precisely, will be eaten."

And though Earthliness forget you,
To the stilled Earth say: I flow.
To the rushing water speak: I am.
-Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. Thomas Pynchon
"Yes, it teaches us about the human body and how we look at things. Cinema is not a series of abstract ideas but rather the phrasing of moments." -Godard
"And emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level." - Bob Dylan
Future Site of Valuable Quotation!

'He's from the government!' 'What government?' 'Our government.' 'I don't know what 'our government' is anymore, do you? What does that mean, 'our government'?' 'That means he knows more than us. He's smarter than us. He knows the Big Picture, Emma. He's got a plan.' -Sam Shepard