help!

"The graduating class of 2005 can claim, with perhaps more credibility than any other class in history, that during its four years of college the world went crazy. In the fall of 2001, our planet earth and the United States of America were different sorts of places – in tone, in tolerance, in peace and war, in ideas and in ideals - than they are on this spring day in 2005. These past years have been extraordinary in the express rate of change, well beyond the usual standards of culture, well above the personal watermarks you have stamped as college students. As college graduates, you now live in a brand new world, with new versions of political upheaval, global pandemic, world war and religious polarization, the likes of which have rarely visited our planet all at once – and thank God for that.
...
We need help. Your help. You must help. Please help. Please provide Help. Please be willing to help. Help… and you will make a huge impact in the life of the street, the town, the country, and our planet. If only one out of four of each one hundred of you choose to help on any given day, in any given cause – incredible things will happen in the world you live in.
Help publicly. Help privately. Help in your actions by recycling and conserving and protecting, but help also in your attitude. Help make sense where sense has gone missing. Help bring reason and respect to discourse and debate. Help science to solve and faith to soothe. Help law bring justice, until justice is commonplace. Help and you will abolish apathy – the void that is so quickly filled by ignorance and evil."

--Tom Hanks, Vassar College Commencement Speech, 2005

bird buddies

"Please don't feed the birds."
--Sign in Steamers, Seattle seafood eatery -- I wondered why this sign was inside the restaurant, until I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, a bird casually walking by my table.

blue plans for happiness

"We had collected in our years together a sizable library of books and a large set of record albums, neither of which were readily available in those days. Guests had brought us gifts discreetly, knowing our tastes ... We were very proud of our home: books in Hungarian, English, German, French, recordings of classical and jazz music ... We could never, and certainly not at this late date, hope to carry our treasures out of the country with us. Hungary was closing its every border, every gap in its skin, with terrible speed. We had to accept this fate, that our treasure would be stolen from us, and there was terrible regret over this. But my beautiful husband was clever to the very end. He had an idea, you see, because ... he saw me weeping -- it is ridiculous to say now -- over Alice in Wonderland. Not the Bible, not Petofi or Arany or Kis, not even Tolstoy. I could not bear to lose my Alice. He saw me on the floor, holding it like a baby ... he did not scold me for wasting time. He understood at once why I was crying, and he told me what we would do, and we did it. We spent one long night making a catalog of our literature and music. Of our life and pleasures. We took turns with the pen. One of us recited; one of us wrote. You must think of this beautiful scene ... There are tanks rolling up the streets of your home. Where you grew up ... And behind a blackened window, by candlelight, my husband and I scribble and whisper ... We knew there was a risk, of course, we were not fools, we were merely excited and sure that this was worth it and that we would survive and have this tale to tell later, elsewhere, to very impressed admirers like you and that we would have the pleasure of rebuilding this collection ... We were laughing because we were escaping with the blue plans, the design for our happiness, and if they exploded our building, if they burned our books, if they melted our records with their flame-shooters, if they fouled my piano, they will still not hurt us.
--Prague, Arthur Phillips

superficiality of days

"I was trying to write a book that simply would not come. I did my daily five hundred words, but the characters never began to live. So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless passe move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends."
--The End of the Affair, Graham Greene

graham greene

"I have never been able to describe even my fictitious characters except by their actions. It has always seemed to me that in a novel the reader should be allowed to imagine a character in any way he chooses: I do not want to supply him with ready-made illustrations. Now I am betrayed by my own technique, for I do not want any other woman substituted for Sarah, I want the reader to see the one broad forehead and bold mouth, the conformation of the skull, but all I can convey is an indeterminate figure turning in the dripping macintosh, saying 'Yes, Henry?' and then 'You?'"
...........................
"I had no idea whatever of falling in love with her. For one thing, she was beautiful, and beautiful women, esepcially if they are intelligent also, stir some deep feeling of inferiority in me. I don't know whether psychologists have yet named the Cophetua complex, but I have always found it hard to feel sexual desire without some sense of superiority, mental or physical."
--The End of the Affair, Graham Greene

discomfort

"We prefer to do things comfortably."
"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
--Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

the only truth that matters

"Art is not cosy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing."
--The Black Prince, Iris Murdoch

married bliss?

"Marriage is a curious institution ... I cannot quite see how it can be possible. People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars. The human soul is not framed for continued proximity, and the result of this enforced neighbourhood is often an appalling loneliness for which the rules of the game forbid assuagement. There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together. Those outside the cage can, to their own taste, satisfy their need for society by more or less organized dashes in the direction of other human beings. But the unit of two can scarcely communicate with others, and is fortunate, as the years go by, if it can communicate within itself."
--The Black Prince, Iris Murdoch

flagrant violations of reality

In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird."
--1984, George Orwell

then and now

"If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five percent of the population ... could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated ... the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it. And yet -- !"
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"To keep them in control was not difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumors and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice."
--1984, George Orwell

baldwin

"... Before him, then, the slope stretched upward, and above it the brilliant sky, and beyond it, cloudy, and far away, he saw the skyline of New York. He did not know why, but there arose in him an exultation and a sense of power, and he ran up the hill like an engine, or a madman, willing to throw himself headlong into the the city that glowed before him.
But when he reached the summit he paused; he stood on the crest of the hill, hands clasped beneath his chin, looking down. Then he, John, felt like a tyrant who might crush this city beneath his heel; he felt like a long-awaited conqueror at whose feet flowers would be strewn and before whom multitudes cried, Hosanna! He would be, of all, the mightiest, the most beloved, the Lord's anointed; and he would live in this shining city which his ancestors had seen with longing from far away. For it was his; the inhabitants of the city had told him it was his; he had but to run down, crying, and they would take him to their hearts and show him wonders his eyes had never seen."
--Go Tell It On the Mountain, James Baldwin

pod envy

Word of the day: iSnob
"An iSnob is someone who walks the halls carrying their iPod, like they are above the rest of us."
--coworker (apparently I am the first iSnob)

always in flux

"People, he had said, were always being looked at as points, and they ought to be looked at as lines. There weren't any points, it was false to assume that a person ever was anything. He was always becoming something, always changing, always continuous and moving, like the wiggly line on a machine used to measure earthquake shocks. He was always what he was in the beginning, but never quite exactly what he was; he moved along a line dictated by his heritage and his environment, but he was subject to every sort of variation within the narrow limits of his capabilities."
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"It was not permanence alone that made what the Anglo Saxons called home, he thought. It was continuity, the flux of fashion and decoration moving in and out again as minds and purses altered, but always within the framework of the established and recognizable outline. Even if the thing itself was paltry and dull, the history of the thing was not."
--The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Wallace Stegner

he flunks

"In the wake of successful Iraqi elections, President Bush's job approval rating has jumped up to 57%, or, as high school teachers call it, an "F."
--Tina Fey, SNL

untitled

"I'm beginning to believe all engineers are liars."
--coworker

random acts of creativity

Participant quotes from a creative writing workshop:
"I have intimacy issues with my characters."
"When do bat girls bloom?"
"OK, here's the woo woo part."

why read

"Someone who is engrossed in literature has learned that every individual has different dimensions to his personality. ... Those who judge must take all aspects of an individual's personality into account. It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else's shoes and understand the other's different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless. Outside the sphere of literature only one aspect of individuals is revealed. But if you understand their different dimensions you cannot easily murder them ... If we had learned this one lesson our society would have been in much better shape today."
--Iranian student in Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi

groundhog bush

"Today is Groundhog Day and the State of the Union Address.

It is an ironic juxtaposition: one involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a hideous little creature of marginal intelligence for prognostication.

The other involves a groundhog."
--anonymous

nationalized religion

"... women of her mother's generation could walk the streets freely, enjoy the company of the opposite sex, join the police force, become pilots, live under laws that were among the most progressive in the world regarding women ... in the course of nearly two decades, the streets have been turned into a war zone, where young women who disobey the rules are hurled into patrol cars, taken to jail, flogged, fined, forced to wash the toilets and humiliated, and as soon as they leave, they go back to do the same thing. Is she aware ... of her own power? Does she realize how dangerous she can be when her every stray gesture is a disturbance to public safety?

Whoever we were--and it was not really important what religion we belonged to, whether we wished to wear the veil or not, whether we observed certain religious norms or not--we had become the figment of someone else's dreams. A stern ayotollah, a self-proclaimed philosopher-king, had come to rule our land. He had come in the name of a past, a past that, he claimed, had been stolen from him. And he now wanted to re-create us in the image of that illusory past. Was it any consolation, and did we even wish to remember, that what he did to us was what we allowed him to do?"
--Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi

station wagon

"Don't they know I am only a station wagon?"
--anonymous writer in creative writing workshop