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

sour grapes is built in

If little children and primates show pretty much the same pattern you see in adults, it calls into question just how deliberate these rationalization processes are.
-Matthew D. Lieberman, psychologist at the University of California
nytimes.com

the saddest thing

In the past the whales had been able to sing to each other across whole oceans, even from one ocean to another because sound travels such huge distances underwater. But now, again because of the way in which sound travels, there is no part of the ocean that is not constantly jangling with the hubbub of ships' motors, through which it is now virtually impossible for the whales to hear each other's songs or messages.
-Dirk Gently in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, Douglas Adams

is there anybody out there

Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean, nor how clearly you mean what you mean. But if you have vitality enough of knowing enough of what you mean, somebody and sometime and sometimes a great many will have to realize that you know what you mean and so they will agree that you mean what you know, what you know you mean, which is as near as anybody can come to understanding any one.
-Gertrude Stein, Four in America