deliberate solitude

"More often than not people who see me on trains and in ships, or in restaurants, feel a kind of resentment of me since I taught myself to enjoy being alone. Women are puzzled, which they hate to be, and jealous of the way I am served, with such agreeable courtesy, and of what I am eating and drinking, which is almost never the sort of thing they order for themselves. And men are puzzled too, in a more personal way. I anger them as males.
I am sorry. I do not like to do that, or puzzle the women either. But if I must be alone, I refuse to be alone as if it were something weak and distasteful, like convalescence. Men see me eating in public, and I look as if I 'knew my way around'; and yet I make it plain that I know my way around without them, and that upsets them."
--MFK Fisher, The Gastronomical Me

to be happy

"To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruit of your passion, and learned your place in the world."
--Santayana

the sea

"I had ever had the conviction, resistant to all rational considerations, that at some unspecified future moment the continuous rehearsal which is my life, with its so many misreadings, its slips and fluffs, will be done with and that the real drama for which I have ever and with such earnestness been preparing will at last begin. It is a common delusion, I know, everyone entertains it."
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"I experienced a sense almost of panic as the real, the crassly complacent real, took hold of the things I thought I remembered and shook them into its own shape. Something precious was dissolving and pouring away between my fingers. Yet how easily, in the end, I let it go. The past, the real past, matters less than we pretend."
--John Banville, The Sea

goodbye don -- we wish we hardly knew ye

"It is unknowable how long that conflict [the war in Iraq] will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months."
--Donald Rumsfeld, Feb. 2003
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The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.
—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing
(formed into verse in Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld, by Hart Seely)

the speed of gossip

"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."
--Mark Twain

sometimes the irony kills me

"You cannot win the war on terror if you don't have a plan to win the war."
--George W. Bush, campaigning in Missouri