page five:
Told me by Rahul Kumar – the mantra that North American students occasionally murmur to themselves of service in N.A. when they can't get what they want at Oxford!:
North American mantra – Bigger better faster cheaper open longer.
From "Message in a Bottle" by the Police:
"Hope can mend your life but love can break your heart."
In letters from Brian Hollohan:
– "This pursuit of excellence is gratifying and healthy. The pursuit of perfection is frustrating, neurotic, and a terrible waste of time." – Edwin Bliss
– "There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking." – Alfred Korzybski
– "Too much sanity may be madness, and the maddest of all – to see life as it is and not as it should be." – Man of La Mancha
From the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip – Calvin's dad swearing:
Slippin' rippin' dang fang rotten zarg barg–a–ding–dong!
From T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone (an otherwise irredeemably bad novel) – said of Kay:
– He was not at all an unpleasant person really, but clever, quick, proud, passionate and ambitious. He was one of those people who would be neither a follower nor a leader, but only an aspiring heart, impatient in the failing body which imprisoned it.
From Christopher Dewdney's The Secular Grail: Paradigms of Perception:
– in the section CITY STATES: Once you have committed yourself to the role of passenger, your anxieties shift to concerns about lack of control over the handling of the moving vehicle. Certain passengers feel a strong need to communicate with the driver in order to contribute to the vehicle's control. In airplanes this need has to be sublimated entirely, hence the fear of flying. In automobiles, however, passengers have direct access to to the driver and can allay their anxieties by delivering manoeuvering options. (from "Control, Observation and Transit Anxiety")
– in the section INTIMATE STRANGERS: Sexual skill is a creaturely cleverness....the collaborative project of rapture.... (from "Sexual Intelligence")
– in the section SLEIGHTS OF HAND: [daydreaming is] a sort of mental doodling at the edge of our attention. (from "Daydreams")
From Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera:
Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them...life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves. (p165)
From "Raise a Little Hell" by Trooper:
If you don't like what you've got, why don't you change it –
If your world is all screwed up, rearrange it....
If you don't like what you see, why don't you fight it –
If you know there's something wrong, why don't you right it?
