I came across this quote when cleaning out my inbox today. I like the source.

"Remember, the loudest person in the room is the weakest."

--'Frank Lucas,' Denzel Washington's character in "American Gangster"

"We have the idea that our hearts, once broken, scar over with an indestructible tissue that prevents their ever breaking again in quite the same place, but..."

from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon

Jitterbug Perfume

First things first: if you haven't noticed by now, I love quotes. When I'm reading a book, I usually do it with a pencil in hand, and go through the whole thing underlining and starring passages/words/paragraphs that I love (only if the book belongs to me, of course). Most books I've read in the past couple of years are marked up like this, and some much more than others. One of the most marked up is my copy of Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins. I've dog-eared and pencil-marked the hell out of this thing. So, this is something I've wanted to to do for a very long time, but keep procrastinating on: just write down all the bits and pieces of this book that I've marked in one place. So, here goes, my absolute favorite passages from one of my absolute favorite books. No need to keep reading if you don't want, this is really just for my sake.

Firstly, this book has one of my favorite openings, right up there with the opening of The Poisonwood Bible (which is also one of my favorite books of all time, with the most evocative first paragraph). It is too long to reproduce here, but here is part of it:

"The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious....The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip....An old Ukrainian proverb warns, "A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil." That is a risk we have to take." 1-2

And onward we go....

"On their sofas of spice and feathers, the concubines also slept fretfully. In those days the Earth was still flat, and people dreamed often of falling over edges" 17

"They fell asleep smiling. It is to erase the fixed smiles of sleeping couples that Satan trained roosters to crow at five in the morning" 34

"If the world be round, I can scarcely help it" 43

"...they were trading the live wood of the maypole for the dead carpentry of the cross...they were straining so desperately for admission to paradise that they had forgotten that paradise had always been their address." 142

"The Middle Ages hangs over history's belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size 48 shorts forever" 154

"As a point of departure for the psyche, however, a crystal ball has merit, although a mandala, a seashell, or a cigarette pack can be as effectively employed" 157

"Alobar...slipped recklessly out of the shop while the sun's seal was still affixed to the scroll of the horizon" 193

"Like a baby grand in a town without piano movers, Madame had settled firmly into place" 220

"....in Massachusetts it was half past five, a time of night that could lay some legitimate claim to the morning, and a cold crack of oyster light was beginning to separate the sky from the Atlantic" 245

"The universe does not have laws.

It has habits.

And habits can be broken" 251

"Wearing the dawn like silver on their wings" 291

"However more abbreviated than its cousins it may look, February feels longer than any of them. It is the meanest moon of winter, all the more cruel because it will masquerade as spring, occasionally for hours at a time, only to rip off its mask with a sadistic laugh and spit icicles into every gullible face, behavior that grows quickly old" 303

"It was no accident that our ancestors pinned Valentine's Day on February's shirt: he or she lucky enough to have a lover in frigid, antsy February has cause for celebration, indeed. Except to the extent that it "tints the buds and swells the leaves within," February is as useless as the extra r in its name. It behaves like an obstacle, a wedge of slush and mud and ennui, holding both progress and contentment at bay." 304

"But, then, who could guess the identity of any of the costumed or the masked? And wasn't that--and not the lust and the gluttony--the true beauty of Mardi Gras? A mask has but one expression, frozen and eternal, yet it is always and ever the essential expression....The freedom of the masked is not the vulgar political freedom of the Divine, beyond politics and beyond success. A mask, any mask, whether horned like a beast or feathered like an angel, is the face of immorality." 309

"Live by the heart if you would live forever" 317

Love

"Love is the practice of difference as relation"

-Catherine Keller, from Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming, a crazy-amazing-beautiful-confusing book I read for my Experience of G-d class last semester.

Shabbat Shalom

"Never give up, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn."
--Harriet Beecher Stowe, Am. author and abolitionist

Summer Time

Oh, how times have changed...this is from a 1957 issue of Modern Girl magazine: 

"It is hardly necessary to waste words over the so-called bikini since it is inconceivable that any girl with tact and decency would ever wear such a thing"

Well done, Modern Girl, well done.

Just a thought

I went to a lecture tonight by a philosophy professor from Stanford who was talking about her work bringing liberal arts education to women living in a halfway house in the bay area. Her program brings Stanford professors to this halfway house to volunteer to teach classes in Philosophy, Religious Studies, English, Drama, Political Science, etc. It seemed like a really interesting program, and I was happy to learn about it. Also, she included this quote in her lecture, which I liked:

"To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society"

--Theodore Roosevelt

On my mind

"We stopped laughing, I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: Do you like me?"

From "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" by Jonathan Safran Foer

A Poem

DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT

Do not go gentle into that good night, 

Old age should burn and rave at close of day; 

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right, 

Because their words had forked no lightning they 

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, 

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, 

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight 

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, 

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray. 

Do not go gentle into that good night. 

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

--Dylan Thomas

Monday Quote

Curtsey of la mama:

"The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift....It is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned."

     --J.K. Rowling, from her commencement address to Harvard's graduating class of 2008

Sun

Keep your eyes on the sun and you will not see the shadows.

-Aboriginal proverb

QuotieOtie

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening, Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Sorry...

Sorry, I'm on a quote kick....

"Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Einstein

A couple of nice quotes from one Mr. Albert Einstein:

"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity."

"I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

"Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."

"The search for truth is more precious than its possession."

"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war."

For The Day

"That was then, which hasn't ended yet"
-Mary Oliver, in Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?

Trees

From my sister:

"The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now."

--Chinese proverb, quoted in this article on a Tu B'shvat seder, written by a guy who writes one of her favorite foodie blogs, Tea and Food.

100th post!

So, this is my 100th post. Woohoo! Here it is:

First, a quote:

"It's never too late, or in my case too early, to be whoever you want to be. There's no time limit. Start whenever you want. You can change or stay the same. There are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people who have a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of, and if you're not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again."
--The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Second, classes!
My first class was great, but I'm waitlisted on it, so I hope I get in! I have a pretty good chance, so we'll see. Next up is a class I am signed up for but will hopefully drop if I get into the other class. That's in half a hour, so I better get moving!

Marquez

Don’t let yourself die without knowing the wonder of fucking with love.
--Gabriel García Márquez

The entirety of Ernest Hemingway's shortest short story:

"For sale: baby shoes, never worn"

Lunchbox Quotes

My mom started putting quotes in my lunchbox in, I think, 5th grade, maybe 6th. I distinctly remember having a note for every hour of the day on my first day of 5th grade, as it was the first year I was not in the same class as my best friend Jordan, and needed all the help my 11-year-old self could get to get through it. Whether or not these notes were directly related to the "Lunchbox Quotes," I can't remember....Either way, since 'round about that time I have been graced with adorable, funny, touching, beautiful, poignant, and wise sayings (almost!) every single day. I am so thankful for this, really, as the Lunchbox Quotes have been a constant, enduring presence in my life for so long. They've got me researching their authors, had me laugh out loud, influenced my love of literature and my sense of humor, caused me to record my favorite ones and put them up on my dorm walls, and made me smile with the knowledge that my mother was thinking of me, even in college when the quotes no longer come in lunchbox, but e-mail, form. So thanks, Mom, for the Lunchbox Quotes and everything they've done. :-) Here's today's:

Pied Beauty, by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things --
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced -- fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled, (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.