No quarter asked or given

I believe very deeply in the human spirit
and I have a sense of awe about it
because I don't know how people carry on.
What makes the difference in people?
What is it?
I've known people that the world has thrown everything at
to discourage them, to kill them, to break their spirit.
And yet something about them retains a dignity.
They face life and don't ask quarters.

        Horton Foote, The New York Times Magazine 1986

 

 

 

 

 

Times must change

It is all very well to sit back and hope for "the best in this best of all possible worlds"
but it's the course of personal and national suicide.
Unless there is a vast alteration in man's civilization as it stumbles along today,
man will not be here very long and none of us.
Times must change.

     L. Ron Hubbard, Ability newsletter, March1966

Getting what we want

Remember one thing about democracy.
We can have anything we want and at the same time,
we always end up with exactly what we deserve.

        Edward Albee, in Unleashing Intellectual Capital by Charles Ehin

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spring forward

Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.

        Ray Cummings, The Girl in the Golden Atom  

 

 

 

 

 

 

A ribbon of dreams

The camera is much more than a recording apparatus;
it is a medium via which messages reach us
from another world that is not ours
and that brings us to the heart of a great secret.
Here magic begins...A film is a ribbon of dreams.

Orson Welles, in the documentary
Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: The Movies

I would like to watch a movie tonight
in which a stranger rides into town
or where someone embarks on a long journey,

a movie with the promise of danger,
danger visited upon the citizens of the town
by the stranger who rides in,

or the danger that will befall the person
on his or her long hazardous journey—
it hardly matters to me

so long as I am not in danger,
and not much danger lies in watching
a movie, you might as well agree.

I would prefer to watch this movie at home
than walk out in the cold to a theater
and stand on line for a ticket.

I want to watch it lying down
with the bed hitched up to the television
the way they'd hitch up a stagecoach

to a team of horses
so the movie could pull me along
the crooked, dusty road of its adventures.

I would stay out of harm's way
by identifying with the characters
like the bartender in the movie about the stranger

who rides into town,
the fellow who knows enough to duck
when a chair shatters the mirror over the bar.

Or the stationmaster
in the movie about the perilous journey,
the fellow who fishes a gold watch from his pocket,

helps a lady onto the train,
and hands up a heavy satchel
to the man with the mustache

and the dangerous eyes,
waving the all-clear to the engineer.
Then the train would pull out of the station

and the movie would continue without me.
And at the end of the day
I would hang up my oval hat on a hook

and take the shortcut home to my two dogs,
my faithful, amorous wife, and my children—
Molly, Lucinda, and Harold, Jr.

                    Billy Collins

 

 

 

 

International Women's Day

And what is better than wisdom?
        Woman.
And what is better than a good woman?
        Nothing.

            Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales