Whatever your dreams are, start taking them very, very seriously.
– Barbara Sher - Wishcraft
Our choice is not between good and bad; it’s between terrible and worse. The nation has a level of commitment … which I don’t think we can psychically meet, absent huge changes in how the government finances itself.
– Alan Greenspan - Wall Street JournalWhy college is so expensive
High tuitions are no fluke. They exist as a direct result of government-guaranteed student loans. Without such loans, tuition could not rise beyond students’ or their families’ ability to pay. Because students have almost unlimited access to credit, universities are able to raise tuitions without the limits market discipline would otherwise enforce.
Any item for which consumers receive a subsidy to buy will naturally be more expensive with the subsidy than without it.
Peter Schiff - Crash Proof
…nothing could be more humiliating to a rational creature than being required to encourage the development of a base conditional reflex by stopping at a red light when there [is] not an earthly soul around, heeled or wheeled.
– Vladimir Nabokov - Pnin
Speakers of geographic languages seem to have an almost-superhuman sense of orientation[…] They don’t look at the sun and pause for a moment of calculation before they say, “There’s an ant just north of your foot.” They simply feel where north, south, west and east are, just as people with perfect pitch feel what each note is[…] One report relates how a speaker of Tzeltal from southern Mexico was blindfolded and spun around more than 20 times in a darkened house. Still blindfolded and dizzy, he pointed without hesitation at the geographic directions.
The cranium is a spacetraveller’s helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego.
– Vladimir Nabokov - PninDon’t you turn around
Have faith in what you chose
‘Cause life can sense your attitude
I don’t know how
You’ve got to realise
That hope looks in your eyes
If you look away it flies
This is probably the creepiest song I’ve ever heard. It was originally written in about 1656 and called The Twa Sisters. It has been redone multiple times since then. Here’s Crooked Still’s version, called Wind and Rain.
There were two sisters came walkin’ down the stream
Oh the wind and rain
Older one pushed the youngest one in
Cryin’ oh the dreadful wind and rainCoz Johnny gave the youngest a gay gold ring
Oh the wind and rain
Didn’t give the oldest one anything
Cryin’ oh the dreadful wind and rainSo she pushed her into the river to drown
Oh the wind and rain
Watched her as she floated down
Cryin’ oh the dreadful wind and rainShe floated ‘till she came to the miller’s pond
Oh the wind and rain
Cried father o father there swims a swan
Cryin’ oh the dreadful wind and rainThen out of the woods came a fidder fair
Oh the wind and rain
He plucked thirty strands of her long yellow hair
Cryin’ oh the dreadful wind and rainAnd he made a fiddle bow of her long yellow hair
Oh the wind and rain
Made a fiddle bow of her long yellow hair
Cryin’ oh the dreadful wind and rainAnd he made fiddle pegs of her long finger bones
Oh the wind and rain
He made fiddle pegs of her long finger bones
Cryin’ oh the dreadful wind and rainAnd he made a little fiddle of her own breast bone
Oh the wind and rain
The sound could melt a heart of stone
Cryin’ oh the dreadful wind and rainAnd the only tune that the fiddle would play
Was oh the wind and rain
Only tune that the fiddle would play
Was oh the dreadful wind and rain
The most beautiful fate, the most wonderful good fortune that can happen to any human being, is to be paid for doing that which he passionately loves to do.
– The Farther Reaches of Human Nature By Abraham H. Maslow—But my riddle! he said. What opera is like a railwayline?
—Opera? Mr O’Madden Burke’s sphinx face reriddled.
Lenehan announced gladly:
—The Rose of Castile. See the wheeze? Rows of cast steel. Gee!
– Joyce, UlyssesAbout Me
Upon which many were tumbled.
