1. Caught on a side street in heavy traffic, I said to the cabbie, I should have walked. He replied, I should have been a doctor. 2. When can I get on the 11:33 I ask the guy in the information booth at the Atlantic Avenue Station. When they open the doors, he says. I am home among my people.
Harvey Shapiro
Just because we cannot see clearly the end of the road,
that is no reason for not setting out on the essential journey.
On the contrary, great change dominates the world,
and unless we move with change we will become its victims.
Robert F. Kennedy, 1964 speech in Warsaw, Poland
No one makes history,
no one sees it happen,
no one sees the grass grow
Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
Blessed are they who have the gift of making friends,
for it is one of God's best gifts.
It involves many things,
but, above all, the power of going out of one's self
and appreciating whatever is noble and loving in another.
Thomas Hughes, Katherine Frances Jelf, George Edward Jelf: A Memoir
The world’s an inn; and I her guest.
I eat; I drink; I take my rest.
My hostess, nature, does deny me
Nothing, wherewith she can supply me;
Where, having stayed a while, I pay
Her lavish bills, and go my way.
Francis Quarles
Renoir painted his whole long life, down to his very last day.
He painted a little still life of fruit, in bed, the day before he died.
Henri Matisse, Chatting with Henri Matisse, Pierre Courthion
One of the happiest features of possessing a capacious vocabulary is the opportunity to insult your enemies with impunity. While the madding crowd gets mad with exhausted epithets such as “You rotten pig” and “you dirty bum”, you can acerbate, deprecate, derogate, and excoriate your nemesis with a battalion of laser-precise pejoratives. You can brand him or her a grandiloquent popinjay, venal pettifogger, nefarious miscreant, flagitious recidivist, sententious blatherskite, mawkish ditherer, arrant peculator, irascible misanthrope, hubristic narcissist, feckless sycophant, vituperative virago, vapid yahoo, eructative panjandrum, saturnine misanthrope, antediluvian troglodyte, maudlin poetaster, splenetic termagant, pernicious quidnunc, rancorous anchorite, perfidious mountebank, irascible curmudgeon.
Eugene Ehrlich, The Highly Selective Dictionary for the Extraordinarily Literate