The Randymon Bash Blog

Recent Quotes

Without love intelligence is dangerous; without intelligence love is not enough.

– Ashley Montagu

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Boire du cafe empeche de dormir. Par contre, dormir empeche de boire du cafe.

-- Philippe Geluck

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The brighter the stupid burns, the more chance that someone will see the light.

-- D. C. Sessions <dcs@lumbercartel.com> 

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Are you a Masterdebator or a Cunning Linguist?

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Se, nella notte in cui concepi' il If, that night when she conceived duce, Donna Rosa, toccata da divina the Duce (Benito Mussolini), Donna luce, avesse dato al fabbro Rosa (the Duce’s Mother), touched predappiano invece della fica il by a divine inspiration, had given deretano, l'avrebbe presa in culo to the smith from Predappio (Duce’s quella sera Rosa sola e non dad was a smith, Predappio their l'Italia intera. town) instead of her pussy, her arse, who would have taken it up – poesia the butt that night (prendersela in antifascista culo = to be screwed) would have been Rosa only, and not all of Italy.

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The box of animal crackers said “Do not eat if the seal is broken.” I opened it up, and sure enough …

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Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

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If life gives you marmals, make marmalade.

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We live, as we dream – alone….

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(about the Library of Congress archiving all Twitter traffic) - “Sounds like a great (albeit slow) backup plan. Uuencode all your files, break them into short text lines and tweet them with serial numbers and checksums. Let the government be your file storage backup!

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I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.

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In the end, we’re all just water and old stars.

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You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.

 -- Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio

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Qt-Gon Jinn: Do you hear that flushing sound? Jar-Jar Nokia: Nod Qt-Gon Jinn: That is the sound of you flushing your business down the toilet. Nemoidian Ballmer: BRING ME NEW ASSMONKEY! Jar-Jar Nokia: My fucked up! My fucked up!

-- Slash sig, regarding Nokia using Microsoft instead of QT

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After a while I walked over toward the gym. I was going to clean out my locker. No more exercising for me. People always talked about the good clean smell of fresh sweat. They had to make excuses for it. They never talked about the good clean smell of fresh shit. There was nothing really as glorious as a good beer shit - I mean after drinking twenty or twenty-five beers the night before. The odor of a beer shit like that spread all around and stayed for a good hour-and-a-half. It made you realize that you were really alive.

-- Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

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Apple Fanboy: Oh wow, look at those shiny new features in this new product I can buy right now but won’t really use and will restrict me in some horrible way.

MS Fanboy: Oh wow, look at those shiny new features MS is claiming will be in its product sometime soon but I’ve got to buy it right now and just take their word for it.

Linux Fanboy: Oh wow, look at those shiny new features that Gnome has taken away, KDE has added with a horrible skin and insane configuration and Enlightenment has had in alpha state for about a decade now!

BSD Fanboy: Oh wow, look at those shiny new features everyone else had for a decade but are really really well tested and secure so nobody can penetrate my system and learn my secret to eternal life!

Apple, MS and Linux fanboys: AAAAH, The undead! Run for your lives!

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A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.

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The three laws of thermodynamics: (1) You can’t win. (2) You can’t break even. (3) You can’t even quit.

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Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.

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Always listen to the experts. They’ll tell you what can’t be done, and why. Then do it.

– Heinlein: Time Enough for Love

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“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”

–Marshall McLuhan

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Reddit loves meat but hates farming Reddit hates corporations but loves products Reddit wonders why it can’t get girls, but hates everything that girls like and do Reddit loves diversity but hates religion Reddit believes in critical thinking, but is powerfully swayed by top voted comments Reddit is full of people who will argue points they don’t care about or believe in just so they can attempt to be right Reddit will go batshit insane if someone reposts their rage comic, but thinks downloading media from TPB is noble and Reddit has gotten much, much worse in the recent years

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As I see it, get Facebook and you get an unwanted email address. Get a Google email address and you get an unwanted social network with it.

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Firefox is the greatest browser, with advanced features to benefit every user at a profound spiritual level:

• Its memory bloat teaches us to be mindful of our resources, both within the computer, and our use of our resources in everyday outer life.
• Its slowness helps teach us patience.
• When the whole browser freezes up from a bit of incompetent CPU-thrashing javascript code running in one tab, it teaches us to be responsible for our own coding decisions and how they affect others.
• Its slow startup teaches us that wonderful things don’t happen instantly, and that we need to lose our attachment to time

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Stay away from Chrome - it feeds the ego by promoting our addiction to instant gratification

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We’ve seen the same thing in the American Congress and probably for the same reasons: the moderates, seeking consensus and pragmatism, drop out in frustration. The hardnosed radical nutjobs hang on tight to their ridiculous ideologies and scream and threaten until they get their way.

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Google Glass - At last a Segway for your face.

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Usenet: a herd of performing elephants with diarrhoea. Massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.

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Daybreak.

At windward passage, four hundred miles due east, the sun is rising. Wind east-northeast, thirty-eight knots, with gusts to forty-five: a gale.

Black waves, wind-feathered. White birds, dark birds.

The trade winds freshen at first light, and the sea rises in long ridges, rolling west.

    -- Peter Matthiessen, Far Tortuga

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It is far easier to spend a hundred years in jail, to climb a hundred mountains, than to try to persuade a stupid person of the truth.

   -- Pahlavan Mahmoud

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From the beginning it was a silly idea, without the slightest utilitarian purpose or merit. This, of course, I liked.

    -- Stuart Stevens

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The trouble with journeys nowadays is that they are easy to make but difficult to justify.

  -- Peter Fleming (early 1900s)

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We would never travel on the sea if we had no hope of telling about it later.

-- Blaise Pascal

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The temperature has risen to nineteen and the heat has drawn birds into the boughs of trees. The titmouse is the bravest, the wren the most cheerful. Oddly, the small creatures allow me greater proximity before flight. The large ones - deer, fox, the bears from home - all flee at my approach. The same is true of humanity. When we are small, we let others in close, then begin the gradual pushing away that so often leaves the old utterly alone.

– Chris Offutt, The Same River Twice

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The opacity of fresh snowfall unfolds like a silent fan. The wood-pile tarp is welded to the ground. I have begun to see pregnancy everywhere, the curve of a belly, the strain of release. Women give form to the language of life. Without them, men are mute. If fatherhood is compromise, then motherhood is sacrifice, an abandoning for the sacred, an act of heroism. Aztec women who died in childbirth went to the same exalted branch of heaven as warriors slain in battle.

– Chris Offutt, The Same River Twice %

Humans are the underclass of evolution. Every other creature was better equipped.

   -- Robert Pirsig

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When Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he replied that it would be a good idea.

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Happiness is like a butterfly that, when diligently pursued, remains just out of reach, but should you stop chasing, may alight upon you for a moment.

  -- paraphrase of Nathaniel Hawthorn

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Wooten’s law: “The acquisition of uncommon knowledge inhibits the application of common sense.”

Referring, of course, to the computer, Wooten was quick to point out that prior to the computer age, engineers had to rely on such things as engineering judgment and common sense - a requirement which no longer exists. The classic statement which he made is applicable to any complex analysis: “The computer’s rapid solution of stupendous … (analyses) … renders obsolete the necessity of understanding them. No one need feel guilty of using simple solutions when the computer can make them extremely complicated. Anyone can plug a false assumption into an incorrect formula and, in a flash, arrive at a ridiculous answer, inaccurate to ten decimal places. (It has never been clear to how many places an incorrect answer must be carried to make it accurate).

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By channels of coolness the echoes are calling. And down the dim gorges I hear the creek falling: It lives in the mountain where moss and the sedges Touch with their beauty the banks and the ledges.

-- Henry Kendall

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One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict on our enemies.
– Aldous Huxley

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A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of exceticism.
– Aldous Huxley

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So we move down the empty road. I don’t want to own these prairies, or photograph them, or change them, or even stop, or even keep going. We are just going down the empty road. – Robert Pirsig

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It’s not a personality clash between them; it’s something else, for which neither is to blame, but for which neither has any solution, and for which I’m not sure I have any solution either, just ideas. – Robert Pirsig

The truth knocks on the door and you say, ‘Go away. I’m looking for the truth.’ – Robert Pirsig %

Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive.

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Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster. … When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it’s a hollow victory. In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again in some other way, and again and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out. That’s never the way.

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The night was very gentle, and the dark transparent sea was cleft at our stern into two long green curtains of gossamer where our steering oars ignited the bioluminescence. – Ring of Fire %

In that Dragon’s eye which looked into me, as I hung precariously above it, I realized I had seen how old and strong is the Dragon’s history - and how much of its history is mine. For long as we may have been humans, and Tarsoids, and mammals and fish, our longest dream was as reptiles.

Komodo lies there to remind us, right now, wherever we are. – Ring of Fire

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You point to something as having Quality and the Quality tends to go away. Quality is what you see out of the corner of your eye. – Robert Pirsig

% You never gain something but that you lose something.

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The “Dark Ages” were merely the resumption of a natural way of life that had been momentarily interrupted by the Greeks.

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It is possible that this sort of movie fantasy, which is available to the solitary traveler, is one of the chief reasons for travel. She had cast herself in the role of leading lady in her search drama, and I gladly played my part. We were far from home: we could be anyone we wished. Travel offers a great occasion to the amateur actor. – Paul Thereaux

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The Celtic Rune of Hospitality We saw a stranger yesterday. We put food in the eating place, drink in the drinking place, music in the listening place. And with the sacred name of God, the stranger blessed us and our house our cattle and our dear ones. As the lark says in her song, often, often, often goes the Christ in the stranger’s guise.

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The problems were those which arise wherever a stable, collective system and one based on expansion and individual profit collide … To obtain respect in the native world people had to redistribute wealth; for esteem in the white world they had to hoard it. – Richard Wright

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It was a small tropical station in the north of Ceylon, smelling of soaked jungle and erupting drains, and with that decay that passes for charm in equatorial outposts. – Paul Thereaux

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It is ignominious when a person travels a great distance [just] to die.

% His face was grey, waxen with illness, and strained; he looked as if her were painfully swallowing the toad of death.

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Know what I herd? sheep Know what I saw? wood Know who I love? ewe. – miscellaneous personal ad from the Sun.

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To a young woman of an old fashion who loves art not for its own sake but because it enables life, who reads poetry not to kill time but to fill it with beautiful thoughts and who still believes in God and duty and immortal love I dedicate this book. – Henry Van Dyke, “The Poetry of Tennyson”

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You are a poet … not because you write stories, but because you understand and love nature. It doesn’t matter to most people that the wind sings in the trees or that a mountain shimmers in the sunlight. But you find life in all of this, a life you can partake of. – Hermann Hesse

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One night she came back from her daily walk stunned by the revelation that one could be happy not only without love, but despite it. – Love in the Time of Cholera

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Nothing resembles a person as much as the way he dies.

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Suddenly she sighed: “It is incredible how one can be happy for so many years in the midst of so many squabbles, so many problems, damn it, and not really know if it was love or not.”

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Watching bulbous, sodden clouds, those dark sailors of the heavy sky, brush the snowy, veined mountain-tops and shroud the grey landscape below in dancing shadows and veils of wetness – journal, 1993

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It would have been more prudent to leave the day before. Yes, well it would have been prudent to stay at home. You have to let things go their own way, or why be here at all. – Jupiter’s Travels

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All the way I was saying goodbye. – Jupiter’s Travels %

Extreme situations always seem absurd until they happen. – Jupiter’s Travels %

Does it rain because you carry your umbrella, or because you don’t? It’s a personal matter depending on how you remember it. – Jupiter’s Travels

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There had been no awkwardness, no break even in the mood. The episode had seemed quite natural. It went one way, could as easily have gone another. I sat up with my back against a pillar and smoked another cigarette, lost in the mystery of it. – Jupiter’s Travels

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Thoreau: “We are in a great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” If Thoreau were alive today he would find full confirmation of his fears. Instant information is instantly obsolete. Only the most banal ideas can successfully cross great distances at the speed of light. And anything that travels very far very fast is scarcely worth transporting, especially the tourist.

-- Jupiter’s Travels

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I am learning, as I make my way through my first continent, that it is remarkably easy to do things, and much more frightening to contemplate them. – Jupiter’s Travels

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For me this is a landscape and a time to bank up courage in a craven heart, to carry a greater fund of joy into the next cloud of sorrow, to learn even to love the sorrow for the pleasure it divides, like the black notes of a keyboard, or hunger between meals. Perhaps even to discover that pain and pleasure, since they cannot exist without each other, are really the same thing. – Jupiter’s Travels

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Like all strong prejudices they not only prepared me for the worst. They paved the way. – Jupiter’s Travels

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… I felt myself to be the most privileged person on the earth to be able to pass through where others saw only normality, and to think myself in paradise. – Jupiter’s Travels %

… their happiness had an unusual clarity and depth, like a clear pool, that invited others to jump in and share.

-- Jupiter’s Travels

% [the monkeys] seemed so close to enlightenment, as though at any moment they might stumble over it and explode into consciousness. They experiment with any familiar object … just as a human baby does … And nothing comes of it. To be so close, yet never pierce the veil! I looked at myself in the same light, as a monkey given my life to play with, prodding it, trying to stretch it into different shapes, dropping it and picking it up again, suspecting always that it must have some use and meaning, tantalized and frustrated by it but unable to make sense of it. – Jupiter’s Travels %

The vital instrument of change is detachment and traveling alone was an immense advantage. At a time of change the two aspects of a person exist simultaneously; and with a caterpillar turning into a butterfly there is the image of what you were and the image of what you are about to be, but those who know you well see you only as you were. They are unwilling to recognize change. By their actions they will try to draw you back into your familiar ways.

-- Jupiter’s Travels

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The truth obviously does not reveal itself unaided to humans. It has to be uncovered by an effort of consciousness. Or more likely, it exists only in human consciousness. Without man around to recognize it there is no truth, no God. – Jupiter’s Travels %

I smiled to myself at the sight of this money, ‘O drug’ said I aloud, ‘what art thou good for? Thou are not worth to me to me, no, not the taking off of the ground; one of those knives is worth all this heap; I have no manner of use for thee, e’en remain where thou art, and go to the bottom as a creature whose life is not worth saving.’ However, upon second thoughts, I took it away … – Robinson Crusoe %

There is an intense but simple thrill in setting off in the morning on a mountain trail knowing that everything you need is on your back. It is a confidence in having left all inessentials behind and of entering a world of natural beauty which has not been violated, where money has no value, and possessions are a dead weight. The person with the fewest possessions is the freest: Thoreau was right. – Paul Theroux %

From what I have said of the natives of New Holland they may appear to be some of the most wretched people on earth. But in reality they are far happier than we Europeans, being wholly unacquainted not only with the necessary Conveniences so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in Tranquility. The Earth and the Sea of their own accord furnish them with all things necessary in life. – Captain Cook %

And it is a profound consolation, perhaps the only one, to this haunted animal that wastes most of a long and ghostly life wandering the future and the past on its hind legs, looking for meanings, only to see in the eyes of others of its kind that it must die.

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Whatever this man is - wanderer or evil monk, or saint or sorcerer - he seems touched by what Tibetans call the “crazy wisdom”: he is free.

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All worldly pursuits have but one unavoidable and inevitable end, which is sorrow: acquisitions end in dispersion, buildings end in destruction; meetings, in separation; births, in death. Knowing this, one should from the very first renounce acquisition and heaping-up, and building and meeting, and … set about realizing the Truth … Life is short, and the time of death is uncertain; so apply yourselves to meditation … “ – Milarepa %

You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself flows in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars ….

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When you are ready, the teacher will appear. – Buddhism (from Peter Matthiessen)

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… Followers of trails and of seasons, breakers of camp in the little dawn wind, seekers of watercourses over the wrinkled rind of the world, o seekers, o finders of reasons to be up and gone …” – Saint John Perse

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It was at that moment that I realized that while it is possible to love two people at the same time, in different ways, in the heart, it is not possible to do so in the world. – David Leavitt %

Playfully, absently, without even giving thought to repercussions, she spoke right back to him. A conversation above the spoken words, beyond their meanings. Some folk call it chemistry, some call it lust; some call it honesty.”
– Randall Kenan

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My Sorrow, when she’s here with me, Thinks these dark days of autumn rain Are beautiful as days can be; She loves the bare, the withered tree; She walks the sodden pasture lane …

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There’s two ways of living here now. There’s the old way, look out for your family, die where you was born, fish, cut your wood, keep a garden, make do with what you got. Then there’s the new way - Work out, have a job, somebody tell you what to do, commute, your brother’s in South Africa, your mother’s in Regina, buy every goddamn cockadoodle piece of Japanese crap you can. Leave home. Go off to look for work. And some has a hard time of it. – the Shipping News

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Hard for Bunny, who still measured events on a child’s scale of fair and unfair. – the Shipping News %

How hard it must be to have to appear tougher than you are, and to go round the stray corners of the world with people whose hearts are shallow as far as you are concerned; and to have nothing you wish to be or do that you will risk your life for the reaching of; and to have a face that is pretty only for a time.

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How lucky is a stream, I thought as I lay idly, that has no need to repeat its rounds over the same ground like most of us, looking for something it never finds, but knows its way, and eats through the hills that impede it.

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A very small boy came to drive away the black cows grazing at a distance. Air and water and the busy grass fell silent. In the thickening velvet of the night the moon was soon climbing her steep invisible stair.

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Time and change … [are] visible anywhere and could be seen every morning as one walks to one’s office, since time and space are fluid along Thames as along Euphrates, and everything one looks at is transition. But such basic facts are what the human race, as soon as it has any initiative at all, pathetically smothers out of sight.

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Ever since the tower of Babel was built in the first adventure against space, people have been aware at intervals of the supremacy of Man. It remains perhaps to be proved, but meanwhile the landscape of our age advertises it, regretfully but with success, pushing the more permanent background out of sight. The mountains are there, but the factories take the foreground, and the seaside villa intrudes before the sea; and it is only in untamed corners that one can forget - or possibly remember - to whom the world belongs. The ‘underdeveloped countries’ (the arrogance of this term was almost incredible) - those poor underdeveloped countries may console themselves with the reflection that no great religion was ever born in a landscape whose foregrounds are completely occupied by men.

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The best thing about him was his wife and the best thing about his wife was a girlfriend named Dezi Duz who did whenever she could and had a Wac uniform that Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife put on every weekend and took off every weekend for every cadet in her husband’s squadron who wanted to creep into her.

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… then drew back the coverlet and stretched herself out luxuriously with an expression of feline expectation. She beckoned to him longingly, with a husky laugh.

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Her own body was such a familiar and unremarkable thing to her that she was puzzled by the convulsive ecstasy men could take from it, by the intense and amusing need they had merely to touch it, to reach out urgently and press it, squeeze it, pinch it, rub it. She did not understand Yossarian’s lust; but she was willing to take his word for it.

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… beckoned him into bed beside her with that look of simpering idiocy of a woman in heat.

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Nately had gone clear out of his mind. He wanted them all to fall in love right away and get married … Nately saw it all very clearly. Love had transmogrified him into a romantic idiot.

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It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret.

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… And with his ear to the reed-stems he caught, at intervals, something of what the wind went whispering so constantly among them.

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Conversation was impossible for a long time; and when it was slowly resumed, it was that regrettable sort of conversation that results from talking with your mouth full.

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But it was good to think he had this place to come back to, this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again, and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.

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To his horror he recollected that he had left both coat and waistcoat behind him in his cell, and with them his pocket-book, money, keys, watch, matches, pencil-case - all that makes life worth living, all that distinguished the many-pocketed from the no-pocketed productions that hop or trip about permissively, unequipped for the real contest.

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It is all very well, when you have a light heart, and a clear conscience, and money in your pocket, and nobody scouring the country for you to drag you off to prison again, to follow where the road beckons and points, not caring wither.

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The Mole was a good listener, and Toad, with no one to check his statements or to criticize in an unfriendly spirit, rather let himself go. Indeed, much that he related belonged more properly to the category of what-might-have-happened- had-I-only-thought-of-it-in-time-instead-of-ten-minutes-afterwards. Those are always the best and raciest adventures: and why should they not be truly ours, as much as the somewhat inadequate things that really come off?

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I remember the old doctor, ‘It would be interesting to watch the mental changes of individuals on the spot.’ I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting. – Heart of Darkness %

Perhaps I had a little fever, too. One can’t live with one’s finger everlastingly on one’s pulse. I had often ‘a little fever,’ or a little touch of other things - the playful paw-strokes of the wilderness, the preliminary trifling before the more serious onslaught which came in due course.

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There was no sign on the face of nature of this amazing tale that was not so much told as suggested to me in desolate exclamations, completed by shrugs, in interrupted phrases, in hints ending in deep sighs.

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It was enough, when you thought it over, to give you the idea of an immense, potent, and invisible hand thrust into the ant-heap of the earth, laying hold of shoulders, knocking heads together, and setting the unconscious faces of the multitude towards inconceivable goals and in undreamt-of directions.

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The seamen were glad to get back into the alleyway. Secretly each of them thought at the last moment he could rush out on deck - and that was a comfort. There is something horribly repugnant in the idea of being drowned under a deck.

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There was an aneroid glass screwed above the couch. He turned that way, struck another match, and discovered the white face of the other instrument looking at him from the bulkhead, meaningly, not to be gain-said, as though the wisdom of men were made unerring by the indifference of matter.

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He [put the box of matches back] now, but before he removed his hand it occurred to him that perhaps he would never have occasion to use that box anymore. The vividness of the thought checked him and for an infinitesimal fraction of a second his fingers closed again on the small object as though it had been the symbol of all these little habits that chain us to the weary round of life. He released it at last, and letting himself fall on the settee, listened for the first sounds of returning wind.

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Environmentalists, naturalists, and conservationists are often asked to defend their concerns for the well-being of other species of living things besides man. The question is, ‘what good are they?’ meaning, of course, what good are they to man, because if one asked what good they were to the planet, one could just as legitimately ask the same question about mankind. – the View from Great Gull

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We are frightened by the power of nature, discomfited by the weather, confused by the unpredictable in our environment; we want to live more comfortably, to enjoy life more and enjoy it longer, to travel faster and more safely. So we invent and construct things that have the effect of putting bulwarks and distances between ourselves and the earth. This gives us a feeling of safety, of mastery over nature, and that feeling tends to separate us spiritually and psychologically from our roots.

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Now fewer and fewer men, using bigger and bigger machines and increasing amounts of chemicals, supply food for more and more people; another force thrusting man away from the reality of the planet - particularly in those nations that have the greatest impact on the planet.

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‘Free as a bird’ is an expression in which a bird might find ironical amusement, especially as coming from man, the only animal who has, in his individual life, succeeded in achieving some measure of independence from the discipline of nature. – Louis J Halle, Jr.

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The cultural upcurve in society hasn’t kept pace with the technological upcurve … our spiritual relation to the planet is not yet scarcely so so sophisticated as our mechanical relation.

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… nibble at the edges of the unknown …

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There has been in recent years excessive emphasis on a citizen’s rights, and inadequate stress upon his duties and responsibilities. – Paxton Blair %

Animals, because they lack opposable thumbs, carry things in their mouths. Animals release their possessions because it’s too difficult to carry them, and so there isn’t any temptation to accumulate. Being able to grasp leads inevitably and naturally to being able to hold and then to being able to keep. And so humans like me fill our holes with what attracts us, and animals continue to be, as they have been for generations, unfettered.

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The secret of Happiness is Freedom, and the secret of Freedom, Courage. – Thucydides %

All our discontents about what we want appeared to me to spring from the want of thankfulness for what we have. – Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

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Wealth I ask not, hope nor love, Nor a friend to know me; All I ask, the heaven above And the road below me. – Robert Louis Stevenson %

Travelling in the company of those we love is home in motion. – Leigh Hunt, English writer %

The sea contains many surprises for him who has his floor on a level with the surface and drifts along slowly and noiselessly. A sportsman who breaks his way through the woods may come back and say that no wild life is to be seen. Another may sit down on a stump and wait, and often rustlings and cracklings will begin and curious eyes peer out. So it is on the sea, too. We usually plow across it with roaring engines and piston-strokes, with the water foaming round our bow. Then we come back and say that there is nothing to see far out on the ocean. – Thor Heyerdahl, Kon Tiki

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The closer we came into contact with the sea and what had its home there, the loess stranger it became and the more at home we ourselves felt. And we learned to respect the old primitive peoples who lived in close converse with the Pacific and therefore knew it from a quite different standpoint from our own. True, we have now estimated its salt content and given tunnies and dolphins Latin names. They had not done that. But, nevertheless, I am afraid that the picture the primitive peoples had of the sea was a truer one than ours.

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It is clear that what he hated the most – what all travellers hate - was not being taken seriously. – Paul Thereaux, Happy Isles of Oceania %

Ah, Davidson, woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life.“ – J Conrad, Victory %

Had the girl been trusted or mistrusted by that man? Whatever it was, it was bound to be wholly! With women there could be no half-measures. %

Heyst envied the Chinaman’s obedience to his instincts, the powerful simplicity of purpose which made his existence appear almost automatic in the mysterious precision of its facts.

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You don’t take a woman into a desert jungle without being made sorry for it sooner or later, in one way or another, and … being a gentleman only makes it worse. – J Conrad, Victory

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And it is a profound consolation, perhaps the only one, to this haunted animal that wastes most of a long and ghostly life wandering the future and the past on its hind legs, looking for meanings, only to see in the eyes of others of its kind that it must die.

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Whatever this man is - wanderer or evil monk, or saint or sorcerer - he seems touched by what Tibetans call the “crazy wisdom”: he is free.

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All worldly pursuits have but one unavoidable and inevitable end, which is sorrow: acquisitions end in dispersion; buildings end in destruction; meetings, in separation; births, in death. Knowing this, one should from the very first renounce acquisition and heaping-up, and building and meeting, and … set about realizing the Truth … Life is short, and the time of death is uncertain; so apply yourselves to meditation … – Milarepa %

When you are ready, the teacher will appear – Buddhism %

“Ladies of easy virtue are also there professionally” – euphemism of the month, Heinrich Haarer, Seven Years in Tibet

% A relationship, you’ve decided, is not something you need like a drug, but a journey, a circumstance, a choice you might make on a particular day. – Cowboys are My Weakness, Pam Houston %

“You like the sea, captain?” “Yes, I love it! The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides. The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the ‘Living Infinite,’ as one of your poets has said … The globe began with the sea, so to speak; and who knows if it will not end with it? In it is supreme tranquility.” – Jules Verne

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The earth does not want new continents but new men.

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Ah! it is a fine death for a sailor!“ said Captain Nemo, at last. "A coral tomb makes a quiet grave; and I trust that I and my comrades will find no other.”

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I never could gamble. I like to work things out in advance, but it bothers me to think of what I might have been missing. I’ve done too much hacking away against the grain of life. Without all that solemn effort, maybe, I could have gone further, faster, easier. Remember what my headmaster said thirty years ago, that tar-stained old walrus: ‘Simon, you think too much.’ “ – Ted Simon

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At the time it seemed to me that what I wanted was to have my problem solved quickly and to get on my way … what happened on the way, who I met, all that was incidental. I had not quite realized that the interruptions were the journey.

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The gods have a great sense of humor, don’t they? If you lack the iron and the fizz to take control of your own life, if you insist on leaving your fate to the gods, then the gods will repay your weakness by having a grin at your expense. Should you fail to pilot your own ship, don’t be surprised at what inappropriate port you find yourself docked. – Tim Robbins %

‘I knew you would follow me,’ she said, with the kind of confidence some women exude when they sense that they have made a clean capture with the vaginal net.

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To eliminate the agitation and disappointment of desire, we need to awaken to the fact that we have everything we want and need right now.

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Madame Lily Devalier always asked ‘where are you?’ in a way that insinuated that there were only two places on earth that one could be: New Orleans and somewhere ridiculous.

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The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being.

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[Their business] did alright. Their marriage did all right, too, which is to say the champagne was far from flat, although there were fewer bubbles per sip than there had been before the arguing started. They argued always about the same thing. It’s best that way. If lovers have to argue, they might as well specialize.

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Like that rarity, the wise husband, it was strong enough to possess its mate, secure enough to allow her her freedom.

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The last man with whom she had lain was a twenty-year-old dishwasher from El Papa Muerta. During a single evening, he had made love to her four times - for three minutes each time. Perhaps it is noteworthy, she thought, that the performance of a young man in bed is roughly the same length as a rock song on AM radio.

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Her vulnerability to Wiggs was opening her up (as voluntary vulnerability often can) in unexpected ways.

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Nostalgia and hope stand equally in the way of authentic experience.

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At birth, we emerge from dream soup. At death, we sink back into dream soup. In between soups, there is a crossing of dry land. Life is a portage.

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The most intense spiritual experiences all seem to involve the suspension of time. It is the feeling of being outside of time, of being timeless, that is the source of ecstasy in meditation, chanting, hypnosis, and psychedelic drug experiences. Although it is briefer and less lucid, a timeless, egoless state (the ego exists in time, not space) is achieved in sexual orgasm, which is precisely why orgasm feels so good.

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Material things anchor one in life much more firmly than the purists would like to believe. – Tom Robbins

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… nor was it that headstrong member with which every conceivable stuffable orifice somewhere sometime has been stuffed.

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South Richmond was a neighborhood of … men who knew more about the carburetor than the clitoris.

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During the week however, [she] used the vaginal wrench to slowly, gently turn her husband’s objections down to a mere trickle.

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[I’m not] altogether certain that there is any such thing as exaggeration. Our brains permit us to use such a wee fraction of their resources that, in a sense, everything we experience is a reduction.

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A lot of life boils down to the question of whether a person is going to be able to realize his fantasies, or else end up surviving only through compromises he can’t face up to. The way I figure it, Heaven and Hell are right here on earth. Heaven is living in your hopes and Hell is living in your fears.

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[Our sex] is always sort of desperate. There’s such need. We cling to each other, like we were holding on with our genitals to keep from falling into emptiness, a kind of lonely void. I have a feeling that it’s like that with a lot of lovers. – Tom Robbins

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He who travels fastest travels alone, but he who travels best travels with a companion, if not always a lover. – Paul Fussell, Abroad

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It is better to travel alone than with a bad companion. – Senegalese proverb

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And as the months passed, sensations sometimes developed into emotions, passions settled down into feelings. – Pico Iyer %

It has been said that the greatest curse to each of the South Sea Islands was the first man who discovered it.

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At sunset they were both out of sight, and we were once more upon the ocean, where sky and water meet.

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There is probably so much of excitement in prolonged expectation that the quiet realizing of it produces a momentary stagnation of feeling as well as effort. – Richard Henry Dana, Jr.

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… if I did not leap at once, I should never leap at all. I bent low on my knees and flung myself forth, with that kind of anger of despair that has sometimes stood me in stead of courage.

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I had become increasingly infuriated by the freedom Muslim men allowed themselves with Western women. To be so oppressive to your own, and so hypocritically free with others, and with apparently no idea of, or attempt to understand, other ways of living, seems common to mankind. I felt no remorse at all for having slammed into Jenny’s attacker. In fact he was lucky that some of the other townspeople separated us, apologizing for his behavior. – Nick Danziger

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The time finally came to depart. At least two hundred mujaheddin gathered to bid me farewell. For the first time in my life I felt as if I had shared contact with a lot of people, but the pleasure this gave me was touched by sadness and even guilt. The westerner’s disease of visiting, doing one’s bit and then leaving. ‘When will you come back?’ they asked me. What could I tell them?

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The mens' faces reflected the hardness of their lives: carrying expressions that looked unable to convey extremes of delight or misery, but which were frozen into resignation. The endurance of the human spirit.

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As I left for the station, she whispered to me, ‘I won’t say goodbye.’ Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing back in England. But perhaps it is as well to recognize that dreams can only ever be dreams. – Nick Danziger %

So many worlds, so much to do, So little done, such things to be. – Alfred Lord Tennyson %

The moon sails overhead, from the tops of the pines to the roof of the hotel, as if it were part of the illumination of the garden. It looks domestic and small among the Afghan mountains: and indeed, before the scientific age that is turning it to its original dust and ashes, what brilliant institution first guessed it to be bigger than any other lamp?

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Lydie, his wife, dipping into the household world where someone has to see about the dinners, made an art of the average life. – Ella Maillart %

As a hot mouth warms a cold spoon, Petal warmed Quoyle.

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But the idea of the north was taking him. He needed something to brace against.

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He liked the rich taste of life so well himself he wished for an entree or two for Quoyle. %

And she was with him again, Petal, like a persistent song phrase, like a few stubborn lines of verse memorized in childhood. The needle was stuck.

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The world was all knots and lashing once - flex and give, that as the way it went before the brute force of nails and screws.

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I knew I had to have a boat. I was in despair. You may think that the equation is ‘boat and water.’ It’s not. It’s ‘money and boat.’ The water is not really necessary. That’s why you see so many boats in boatyards. – the Shipping News

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To my readers young and old - a flowne sheate, a faire winde, a boune voyage.

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Dream dreams then write them aye, but live them first. – Samuel Elito Morison (1887-1976: sailor, historian) %

And I say what and she says I think you’re full of shit And I say baby you understand me. – Raymond Carver %

Keep in mind always the present you are constructing. It should be the future you want. %

And at a lake by Meredith on an August night gone by, a loon called for his lover while stars fell from the sky. He would listen for an answer and only hear the wind. But the stars appeared to like him for quite a few dropped in. – Dean Grodzins in his comic ‘Tangents’

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Usenet is a dinosaur too stupid to know it’s dead. The last ‘evolution’ Usenet had was yEnc. This antique client from 2002 supports that. There’s still some jackhole troll trying to convince people yEnc is a virus. 90% of today’s internet users would look at you like you’d grown a second nose if you asked them what Usenet was. Even the pedophiles have been run off Usenet. All that’s left are pirates, spammers and the few oblivious dinosaurs standing in the swamp watching the pretty light coming down from the heavens to obliterate them.

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“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.” – Carl Bass CEO Autodesk %

The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.

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Putting your data in the cloud is like sending your teenage daughter backpacking in a 3rd world country with a pimp.

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Diplomacy is the art of letting the other party have things your way. – Daniele Vare

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Why do programmers confuse Halloween and Christmas?

Because DEC 25 is OCT 31

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