so tell me what I want, what I really really want

We often go to absurd lengths to ignore our better judgment.
-Susan Schwartz, The Gazette

ecstatic truth

"Many among the scientific community agree the end of human life is assured. Human life is a part of an endless chain of catastrophes, the demise of dinosaurs being just one of those events. We seem to be next."
-Werner Herzog, "The Agony and the Ecstasy," Seed Magazine Dec 2008

and more delicious too

A good tart is far more admirable than a decayed intellect.
-Frank Baum, The Marvelous Land of Oz

wow

However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.
-Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody

nature or nurture

"This is a strange affair, very strange!" declared the Guardian. "But you seem harmless. Folks do not smile so delightfully when they mean mischief."

"As for that," said Jack, "I cannot help my smile, for it is carved on my face with a jack-knife."

-Frank Baum, The Marvelous Land of Oz

but the scars are so interesting

One is never so pretty after being mended, you know.
-the dainty china Princess, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Frank Baum

ultimate practicality

None of them is fit to work, so you may tear them into small pieces.
-Wicked Witch of the West, Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

I just don't feel motivated to run that maze

There’s no such thing as depression in mice.
-Jerry Cott, psychopharmacologist, kansascity.com

fight the power

Freedom is something you have to take for yourself.
-Cory Doctorow, Little Brother

it's not a memory machine

The human brain... the mind... is a quantum-state holistic standing wavefront.
-Dan Simmons, Olympos

wwbkd?

The rubber face. There’s only so many ways you can stare incredulously at the camera and tilt an eyebrow, but that’s your old standby: What would Buster Keaton do?
-Jon Stewart, nytimes.com

we know only that we do not know

Seventeen is nothing. You're still in the womb.

Every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar.

-Douglas Coupland, Hey Nostradamus!

lies, all lies

"After the fall of Troy, it takes Odysseus 10 years to return home. Since Troy was only a hop, a skip and a jump from Greece, do you think Penelope should have been more skeptical about her husband’s explanation for the long delay — a cabal of one-eyed, man-eating giants; a troupe composed entirely of homicidal, aquatic chantoozies; a sorceress who can turn sailors into pigs? Isn’t the whole thing kind of sketchy?"
-Joe Queenan, "There Will Be a Quiz," NYT

i resemble that statement

Aptly uttered is as good as written, an axe cannot destroy it.

To such worthlessness, pettiness, vileness a man can descend! So changed he can become! Does this resemble the truth? Everything resembles the truth, everything can happen to a man. The now ardent youth would jump back in horror if he were shown his own portrait in old age.

In all our gatherings, from the peasant community level up to all possible learned and other committees, unless they have one head to control everything, there is a great deal of confusion.

Many and various among the Russian people are the meanings of scratching one's head.

What a strange, and alluring, and transporting, and wonderful feeling is in the word: road!

Plumpness will in no way be forgiven a hero, and a great many ladies will turn away, saying: "Fie, ugly thing!"

-Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

thoughts from a dead russian

Alas! the fat know better than the slim how to handle their affairs in this world.

Everyone is gripped by something.

One gets a good education, as we know, in a boarding school. And in boarding schools, as we know, three main subjects constitute the foundation of human virtue: the French language, indispensable for a happy family life; the pianoforte, to afford a husband agreeable moments; and, finally, the managerial part proper: the crocheting of purses and other surprises.

You must live by the truth, if you want to be shown respect.

The merry will turn melancholy in a trice, if you stand a long time before it, and then God knows what may enter your head.

Wherever in life it may be, whether amongst its tough, coarsely poor, and untidily moldering mean ranks, or its monotonously cold and boringly tidy upper classes, a man will at least once meet with a phenomenon which is unlike anything he has happened to see before, which for once at least awakens in him a feeling unlike those he is fated to feel all his life.


-Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, 1996 translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky