scrapofpaper | and though they do not know it, all mankind are now your brothers

"Anyone who maintains absolute standards of good and evil is dangerous. As dangerous as a maniac with a loaded revolver. In fact, the person who maintains absolute standards of good and evil usually is the maniac with the revolver."
--Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All

"If it is committed in the name of God or country, there is no crime so heinous that the public will not forgive it."
--Tom Robbins

"On the list of the world's greatest inventions, the mirror is surprisingly high. As invention goes, the genesis of mirrors didn't exactly require a truckload of imagination, the looking glass being merely an extension of pond-surface, made portable and refined. Yet, because it is consulted with such frequency and anticipation by the three billion souls who animate our ball of clay, consulted almost as if it were a powerful deity that can grant favors or take them away; because, whereas most matter absorbs light, the mirror returns light to the world (it arrests light but does not book it, releasing it on its own recognizance); because it also returns, however briefly and superficially, the individual identity that people are prone to surrender to the orthodoxy of the state and its stern gods; because it never fails to provide us with someone to love and someone to hate; the mirror, on the list of great inventions, is rated higher than the thermos bottle, though not quite as high as room service.

" 'I realize, sir,' said Can O' Beans to the mirror, 'that the angle of reflection is always equal to the angle of incidence, but why? Can you explain it?'

" '?ti nialpxe uoy...'

" 'And a further thing, Mr. Mirror,' the can went on: 'Since you reflect chaos and instability as objectively as you reflect order, since you reflect the novelty and variety that humankind's institutions seem designed to suppress and deny, are you not a dangerous agent of truth? I mean, I know that magicians employ you in their trickery, but isn't uncompromising realism your forte? If humans erect institutions to conceal the unruly aspects of their own minds, aren't you mirrors sort of like holes in the fortress walls? Are you not signposts pointing away from rationality and standardization? Because you chaps show it all--good and evil, beauty and ugliness, balance and disarray--with equal emphasis. Or am I making you out to be subversive when actually you're only blasé? No offense intended, sir, in either case.'

" '.esac rehtie ni, ris, dednetni...'

"Oh, it was pointless trying to hold a civil conversation with a mirror. No matter what anybody said to them, they just turned it around."
--Tom Robbins

"Beauty she would not carry like a banner, nor would she take refuge from the world in it like a hermit in a shack. Beauty would just be her everyday thing."
--Tom Robbins

"Happiness? A good wine, a good meal, and a good woman. Or a bad woman, depending on how much happiness you can handle."
--George Burns

"If you make choices based on people's judgment or reactions, then you make really boring choices."
--dubiously Heath Ledger, according to someone-in-my-school's facebook profile (it turned no google results, so I have no idea whether he really said it or whether the chick is crazy, but it made me smile. also, I felt the sole facebook profile quote I have ever enjoyed merited preservation and maybe even a really long-winded parenthetical aside.)

"In the mingle of moonlight and headlamps, neon and leaf-glow, the skyscrapers are as beautiful as a procession of Hindu saints. Bubbling, winking, and crawling with light, they seem as full of sap as the maples in the park.

"Spilling from tenements and condominiums, from boutiques and bodegas, the anxious multitudes have found a new tempo, a pace in between the windup-toy frenzy of winter and the deep-sea diver drag of the humid summer to come. Crushing Styrofoam burger cartons, condom packs, hypodermic syringes, and graffiti-spewing spray cans underfoot, they almost dance as they walk, an unconscious rite of spring in their steps, a forgotten memory of sod and seed and lamb and ring-around-the-rosy. The unfinished and unfinishable symphony to which they move is composed of salsa, rap, and funk from boom boxes, strains of Vivaldi sifting out in the silvery drizzle from fine restaurants and limousines, the sophisticated rhythms produced by Cole Porter's phantom cigarette holder tapping upon the vertebrae of tourists and businessmen in hotel lobbies throughout midtown, fey techno-rock in Sotto bars and art lofts, drum solos banged out on plastic pails and refrigerator trays by brilliant buskers, androgynous anchorpersons announcing the 'news,' a loud screeching of truck and bus wheels, an interminable red bawling of sirens, the tooting of taxis, an occasional gunshot or scream, girlish laughter, boyish boasts, barking dogs, the whine of aggressive beggars, the yowls of the unsheltered insane, and on many a street corner, the greased-lung exhortations of evangelists, ordained or self-proclaimed, warning all who pass that this could be the last April that God will ever grant, as if April were a kitten and God an angry farmer with a sack."
--Tom Robbins