"This is the ruinous nonsense of the mind,
that men come mightily to believe their causes,
because of their mere rage of controversy. . ."
"ANNE. My neck is small: will the King have it cut?
He loved me--once.
CRANMER. Madam, repent, confess,
entreat; the King is gracious.
THE SKELETON. Heaven is gracious,
but few can can draw safe deductions on its method."
"To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors, and holidays; to be Whitely within a certain area, providing toys, boots, cakes, and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone and narrow to be everything to someone? No, a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute."
"Of course they'd need an
Omnipotent god. Look whom
He'd have to pardon."
". . . They live in a hell of marvels: fierce,
Fully automated joys.
The prowess of their engineers
Is justly fabled. They've leapt to the nearest
Lamps of night. Such chasms spanned!--
Too black for all but their blindest seers.
Their warrior class, insufficiently manned,
Is mad, responsive, and under command.
Their weapon of choice is the toggle switch.
Be watchful. They kill with either hand."
". . .
Occasional volcanoes in the parlor, yawn. Arterial
Blood weeping the walls, rising above the ankles
Curdles in the drains and pupils. Ad nauseam! It kills
Sensation in the extremities. And don't come off all teary
On me, now. No more Thus Spake Zarathustra. No big titanium yurt
Over heaven. No more swoopy blue yondering wing-magics--
That's finished. We don't feel for thingamajigs
Anymore. Clear your desk. And tell the engineer he's fired."
"ADAM. Dullards of darkness, light's lazybones
Poor primitives of our natural bareness,
where's your awareness? will moans and groans
for gold of brawn or brain regain
the way to the entry of Paradise? up!
shut your eyes, will you? or make a play
for your leisure, and a treasure of your idleness? You,
have you nothing better to do
in our world but play hide and seek with oblivion?
Say, say something, say
who are you? I will tell you, tell you what you knew,
I am Adam.
…
EVE. Are they fighting again?
ADAM. What else?
They have not the pain that in us stops us fighting.
EVE. Have they found anything?
ADAM. Nothing, my Eve.
They cannot find the centre, the core of the fruit
where the root of return is. I dropped it; it is gone."
- 'What do you keep on arguing for? I'm only telling you the sort of chap I am. I only want my rights. I'm not asking for anybody's bleeding charity.'
- 'Then do. At once. Ask for the Bleeding Charity. Everything is here for the asking and nothing can be bought.'
"Why should quiet ruminants as you and I have been born in such a ghastly age? Let me palliate the apparent selfishness of this complain by asserting that there are people, who, while not, of course, liking actual suffering when it falls to their own share, do really like the 'stir', the 'sense of great issues'. Lord!, how I loathe great issues. How I wish they were all adjourned sine die. 'Dynamic' I think is one of the words invented by this age which sums up what it likes and I abominate. Could one start a Stagnation party - which at General elections would boast that during its term of office no event of the least importance had taken place?"
"His disputes with other physicians, who would not forgive his incredible successes or uncommon methods, were constant and bloody. He had invented a pill to be taken once a year, which enhanced one's health and lengthened one's life but caused such mental derangement for the first three days that no one but the doctor had dared to swallow it. At one time he had been in the habit of playing the harp at the bedside of his patients in order to sedate them with certain music composed for the purpose. He did not practice surgery, which he always considered an inferior art fit only for charlatans and barbers, and his terrifying specialty was predicting the day and hour his patients would die. Both his good name and his bad, however, were based on the same circumstance: It was said, and no one ever disproved it, that he had resurrected a dead man."
"Enough depicting, time to build."
Ex Libris Kirkland (formerly known as "I Just Read . . .") is where I quote, at length, something I found interesting in my reading. The selected passages might be funny, or sad, or true, or false, or irritating, but they all bear thinking about - or at least writing down.
