Never mistake activity for achievement.
- John Wooden
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Never mistake activity for achievement.
- John Wooden
SUCCESS, n. The one unpardonable sin against one's fellows. In literature, and particularly in poetry, the elements of success are exceedingly simple, and are admirably set forth in the following lines by the reverend Father Gassalasca Jape, entitled, for some mysterious reason, "John A. Joyce."
The bard who would prosper must carry a book,
Do his thinking in prose and wear
A crimson cravat, a far-away look
And a head of hexameter hair.
Be thin in your thought and your body'll be fat;
If you wear your hair long you needn't your hat.
When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.
~Leonardo Da Vinci
"I am an intelligent river which has reflected successively all the banks before which it has flowed by meditating only on the images offered by those changing shores."
Victor Hugo
"I am, as I am; whether hideous, or handsome, depends upon who is made judge."
"He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great."
- Melville
From the 1966 book Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me by Richard Farina:
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The sky changed, the entire translucent dome stunned by the swiftness of the shimmering atomic flash. The light drove their once tiny shadows to a terrifying distance in the desert, making them seem like titans. Then it shrank, the aurora crashing insanely backward, like a film in reverse, toppling, swimming into a single white-hot bulge, a humming lump, a festering core. It hovered inches above the horizon, dancing, waiting almost as if it were taking a stoked breath, then swelled in puffing spasms, poking high into the stratosphere, edging out the pale skyrocket vapor trails at either side, the ball going sickly yellow, the shock wave releasing its roar, the entire spectacle catching fire, blazing chaotically, shaming the paltry sun.
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Hours later, at the end of a tangled spool of red registration tape, Gnossos was in the office of the dean himself. A roomy, leather-chaired kind of library, filled with mineralogical specimens. Obscure varieties of limestone, quartz, shale from the gorges, chunks of coal from Newcastle seams, spongy layers of igneous Hawaii, silica, granite, semi-precious stones. All the wrack and refuse of a ridiculous career interrupted by colleagues who sensed incompetency. Instead of dropping him into Maeander with a slab of Carrara marble tied to his leg, they made him a dean. Molder of men.
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There were marks on the wall from strips of masking tape, where he'd torn away the landlord's quaintly familiar Degas, Renoir, Soyer, Utrillo and Mary Cassat prints in a narcotized rage. A nail had been driven into the French doors that separated him from the alcoholic Rajamuttus, and on it was hung the rucksack. It emanated a faint odor of month-old rabbits' feet and Oriental goods from the Greco-Turkish supply company in the negro section downtown. Two rubber plants stood by the fireplace, still in the dappled, plastic pots he'd meant to disguise with flat-black spray. Spilled textbooks everywhere, notes scrawled in the margins, faces drawn on the covers. All horizontal surfaces were occupied by at least one open beer can stuffed with cigarettes saturated in some reeking liquid. And dominating the entire white-walled living room, hanging over the mantel by the number-fifteen housewire anchored to the molding, was the tapestry-like Blacknesse painting of the man cutting away his own head.
What do you think of considering comic strips such as Peanuts as literature? Charles Schultz said a lot of profound things in it. I think. Motherof8Quote:
Originally Posted by Scheherazade
"Seven stars and seven stones, and one white tree."
J.R.R. Tolkien
"I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe." - Franz Kafka.
"Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg."
--Haruki Murakami
"The air was saturated with the finest flower of a silence so nourishing, so succulent, that I could move through it only with a sort of greed, especially on those first still cold mornings of Easter week when I tasted it more keenly because I had only just arrived in Combray." -Marcel Proust
"It's wot's behind me that I am."
"When is a door not a door, and the answer is, when it's a jug - which is all a joke."
-Krazy Kat
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." -F.S. Fitzgerald
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting - Edgar Allan Poe.
The quote I like so much I came here with it as my signature ¬ (Henry David Thoreau)