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scrapofpaper"The invariable mark of wisdom is seeing the miraculous in the common."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity."
--Dorothy Parker
"Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves."
--T. S. Eliot
"Whatever is the lot of humankind
I want to taste within my deepest self.
I want to seize the highest and the lowest,
to load its woe and bliss upon my breast,
and thus expand my single self titanically
and in the end go down with all the rest."
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
"XVI"
I love the handful of the earth you are.
Because of its meadows, vast as a planet,
I have no other star. You are my replica
of the multiplying universe.
Your wide eyes are the only light I know
from extinguished constellations;
your skin throbs like the streak
of a meteor through rain.
Your hips were that much of the moon for me;
your deep mouth and its delights, that much sun;
your heart, fiery with its long red rays,
was that much ardent light, like honey in the shade.
So I pass across your burning form, kissing
you--compact and planetary, my dove, my globe.
--Pablo Neruda
"The mountains appalled me with their 'permanence,' with that awful and irrefutable rock-ness that seemed to intensify my sense of my own transience. Perhaps this dread of transience explains our greed for the few gobbets of raw experience in modern life, why violence is libidinous, why lust devours us, why soldiers choose not to forget their days of horror: we cling to such extreme moments, in which we seem to die, yet are reborn. In sexual abandon as in danger we are impelled, however briefly, into that vital present in which we do not stand apart from life, we are life, our being fills us; ecstasy with another being, loneliness falls away into eternity. But in other days, such union was attainable through simple awe."
--Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard
"If There Is Something to Desire"
If there is something to desire,
there will be something to regret.
If there is something to regret,
there will be something to recall.
If there is something to recall,
there was nothing to regret.
If there was nothing to regret,
there was nothing to desire.
--Vera Pavlova
"It must be those brief moments
when nothing has happened--nor is going to.
Tiny moments, like islands in the ocean
beyond the grey continent of our ordinary days.
There, sometimes, you meet your own heart
like someone you've never known."
--Hans Børli
"We Alone"
We alone can devalue gold
by not caring
if it falls or rises
in the marketplace.
Wherever there is gold
there is a chain, you know,
and if your chain
is gold
so much the worse
for you.
Feathers, shells
and sea-shaped stones
are all as rare.
This could be our revolution:
to love what is plentiful
as much as
what's scarce.
--Alice Walker
"No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows."
--J. Robert Oppenheimer
"...happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory...we are all kings in exile."
--G. K. Chesterton
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity."
--Dorothy Parker
"Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves."
--T. S. Eliot
"Whatever is the lot of humankind
I want to taste within my deepest self.
I want to seize the highest and the lowest,
to load its woe and bliss upon my breast,
and thus expand my single self titanically
and in the end go down with all the rest."
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
"XVI"
I love the handful of the earth you are.
Because of its meadows, vast as a planet,
I have no other star. You are my replica
of the multiplying universe.
Your wide eyes are the only light I know
from extinguished constellations;
your skin throbs like the streak
of a meteor through rain.
Your hips were that much of the moon for me;
your deep mouth and its delights, that much sun;
your heart, fiery with its long red rays,
was that much ardent light, like honey in the shade.
So I pass across your burning form, kissing
you--compact and planetary, my dove, my globe.
--Pablo Neruda
"The mountains appalled me with their 'permanence,' with that awful and irrefutable rock-ness that seemed to intensify my sense of my own transience. Perhaps this dread of transience explains our greed for the few gobbets of raw experience in modern life, why violence is libidinous, why lust devours us, why soldiers choose not to forget their days of horror: we cling to such extreme moments, in which we seem to die, yet are reborn. In sexual abandon as in danger we are impelled, however briefly, into that vital present in which we do not stand apart from life, we are life, our being fills us; ecstasy with another being, loneliness falls away into eternity. But in other days, such union was attainable through simple awe."
--Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard
"If There Is Something to Desire"
If there is something to desire,
there will be something to regret.
If there is something to regret,
there will be something to recall.
If there is something to recall,
there was nothing to regret.
If there was nothing to regret,
there was nothing to desire.
--Vera Pavlova
"It must be those brief moments
when nothing has happened--nor is going to.
Tiny moments, like islands in the ocean
beyond the grey continent of our ordinary days.
There, sometimes, you meet your own heart
like someone you've never known."
--Hans Børli
"We Alone"
We alone can devalue gold
by not caring
if it falls or rises
in the marketplace.
Wherever there is gold
there is a chain, you know,
and if your chain
is gold
so much the worse
for you.
Feathers, shells
and sea-shaped stones
are all as rare.
This could be our revolution:
to love what is plentiful
as much as
what's scarce.
--Alice Walker
"No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows."
--J. Robert Oppenheimer
"...happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory...we are all kings in exile."
--G. K. Chesterton
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