You enter the forest
at the darkest point,
where there is no path.
Where there is a way or path,
it is someone else’s path.
You are not on your own path.
If you follow someone else’s way,
you are not going to realize
your potential.
This is like a cookie, it tastes like a cookie having sex with a doughnut.
If you want to call it that. But it is a very specific sort of magic. There’s a magic you take from death. Something leaves the world, something else comes into it.
To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn’t just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it’s an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.”
[The Title Always Comes Last; NEH 2003 Jefferson Lecturer interview profile]
Every man must decide for himself whether he shall master his world or be mastered by it.
In this dirty minded world, you are either someone’s wife or someone’s whore. And if you’re not either people think there is something wrong with you….but there is nothing wrong with me
It takes the whole of life to learn how to live, and -what will perhaps make you wonder more – it takes the whole of life to learn how to die.
No one can say that death found in me a willing comrade, or that I went easily.
Take what comes and live life without complaint. What will be, will be. Life is a woman’s gift; death is God’s.
The greater part of the world’s troubles are due to questions of grammar.
I would rather spend one lifetime with you, than face all the ages of this world alone.
Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men.
[Quoting Reverend Phillips Brooks, during Remarks at Presidential Prayer Breakfast, February 7 1963]
To call yourself a “realistic” person is intensely arrogant and naïve.
Too many people spend too much time trying to perfect something before they actually do it. Instead of waiting for perfection, run with what you go, and fix it along the way…
For Reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and Passion, unattended,is a flame that burns to its own destruction.
A: The soul wanders in the dark, until it finds love. And so, wherever our love goes, there we find our soul.
Q: It always happens?
A: If we’re lucky. And if we let ourselves be blind.
Q: Instead of watching out?
A: Instead of always watching out.
If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?
My life has been one great big joke,
A dance that’s walked,
A song that’s spoke,
I laugh so hard I almost choke,
When I think about myself.
A student, filled with emotion and crying, implored, Why is there so much suffering?Suzuki Roshi replied, No reason.
You wanted to lick my face the first time you saw me? Is that usually what you do when you’re attracted to guys?” I shake my head. “Not your face, your dimple. And no. You’re the only guy I’ve ever had the urge to lick.” He smiles at me confidently. “Good. Because you’re the only girl I’ve ever had the urge to love.
Just ’cause there’s snow on the roof doesn’t mean there’s not a fire inside.
One time I actually cleaned out my closet so good I ended up on the cover of Time magazine.
He’s dozed off again, but I kiss him awake, which seems to startle him. Then he smiles as if he’d be happy to lie there gazing at me forever.
The more thoroughly a person understands life, the less he will mock, though in the end he might still mock the thoroughness of his understanding.
Learn to enjoy every minute of your life. Be happy now. Don’t wait for something outside of yourself to make you happy in the future. Think how really precious is the time you have to spend, whether it’s at work or with your family. Every minute should be enjoyed and savored.
In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.
‘Hamlet’ is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being; the difference between sanity and insanity; the meaning of life and death; what’s real and not real. All these subjects can literally drive you mad.
Das Spiel ist der Inbegriff demokratischer Lebensart. Es ist die letzt uns verbliebene Seinsform. Der Spieltrieb ersetzt die Religiosität, beherrscht die Börse, die Politik, die Gerichtssäle, die Pressewelt, und er ist es, der uns seit Gottes Tod mental am Leben hält.
I am one who believes that one of the greatest dangers of advertising is not that of misleading people, but that of boring them to death.
You’re not a woman, he said finally. You’re the Grim Reaper with red hair!
Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.
We must peel away the bitterness of life from time to time in order to reveal the richer aspects of life.
It’s all God’s will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.
Seize the time… Live now! Make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again.
Nostalgia is a necessary thing, I believe, and a way for all of us to find peace in that which we have accomplished, or even failed to accomplish. At the same time, if nostalgia precipitates actions to return to that fabled, rosy-painted time, particularly in one who believes his life to be a failure, then it is an empty thing, doomed to produce nothing but frustration and an even greater sense of failure.
We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.
Cancer taught me to stop saving things for a special occasion. Every day is special. You don’t have to get cancer to start living life to the fullest. My post-cancer philosophy? No wasted time. No ugly clothes. No boring movies.
I have goals and ambitions, and I see myself as a lifelong baseball student. I have certain philosophies that I’d like to test at some point at the big league level. The job of manager appeals to me, a coach appeals to me, at a different time frame.
Let us ‘time’ be a friendly coach, putting the enchantment of each ‘present moment’ artfully in a chosen frame of our thoughts. (Quest for the real moment)
My love is meatloaf flavored. I just wish my meatloaf was also meatloaf flavored.
The purpose of a moral philosophy is not to look delightfully strange and counterintuitive or to provide employment to bioethicists. The purpose is to guide our choices toward life, health, beauty, happiness, fun, laughter, challenge, and learning.
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for?
Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.
Create a vision for the life you really want and then work relentlessly towards making it a reality.
FDR Unmasked is first to present convincing evidence of Roosevelt’s battle with prostate cancer, underpinned by FBI memoranda and reliable firsthand information from multiple physicians – even a shocking admission by Eleanor Roosevelt to actress Veronica Lake that her husband was being treated for the disease.
Oh, we’re playing nice now? Shall we have tea first? Brew up a nice pot of kiss-my-ass?
There are any number of magical creatures, mostly female, whose singing can bring about horror and death. Sirens, undines, banshees, Bananarama tribute bands…
I am a bit sassy, with some sarcasm thrown into the mix, but stoic at the same time – and brash.
Every time you think the problem is ‘out there,’ that very thought is the problem.
Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world…enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space.
Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, ‘Where have I gone wrong’.
Then a voice says to me, ‘This is going to take more than one night.
I can blend words easily with my pen, and show concepts from deep within. Yet not everyone gets the message I send. So why do I even let these words begin? Maybe they will soak in one day at the right time. When the readers on a new path to find. So for now I’ll continue to drop ink and not worry about what other people think.
People always speak of Father Time without knowing how wrong they’ve gotten it. It’s fascinating how often people muck up the gender of things.