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DIMA'S BLOG is an interactive collection of music, art, photographs, video clips, audio podcasts, quotations, humor, poetry, interviews, anecdotes and memoir, curated by Dmitri Matheny and with commentary by readers. You can keep up-to-date with Dima's Blog through RSS feeds and email updates. Click on the orange RSS button [below, right] to subscribe. Please pause the streaming music at the bottom of your screen before playing video or audio clips. |
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HYPOCRISY "It is a public scandal that gives offence and it is no sin to sin in secret." ~Jean-Baptiste Poquelin "No man can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which one may be true." ~Nathaniel Hawthorne "For he who lives more lives than one, more deaths than one must die." ~Oscar Wilde CAT FANCY I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat. ~Edgar Allan Poe What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat? ~Friedrich Nietzsche A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering. ~William S. Burroughs A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. ~Mark Twain If you really want to learn about life, get a cat. Because the world is his. ~James Cromwell Everything comes to those who wait... except a cat. ~Mario Andretti I believe cats to be spirits come to earth. A cat, I am sure, could walk on a cloud without coming through. ~Jules Verne You call to a dog and a dog will break its neck to get to you. Dogs just want to please. Call to a cat and its attitude is, 'What's in it for me?' ~Lewis Grizzard QUINTET "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." ~Isaac Newton HUNTER S. THOMPSON on Fuel, Tension & Self-Respect
BE CAREFUL “All meaningful and lasting change starts first in your imagination and then works its way out. Imagination is more important than knowledge.” ~Albert Einstein "It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane." ~Philip K. Dick "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be." ~Kurt Vonnegut LUCK, LOVE & MAKING A LIVING "The lucky person passes for a genius." ~Euripides "Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius." ~Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart "A genius is one who can do anything except make a living." ~Joey Lauren Adams AMOR FATI "We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancients methods is to tell a story, begging the listener to say — and to feel — yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought." ~John Steinbeck "What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, 'This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!' Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, 'Never have I heard anything more divine'?" ~Friedrich Nietzsche "Hear that lonesome whippoorwill? He sounds too blue to fly. The midnight train is whining low, I'm so lonesome I could cry." ~Hank Williams A NEW DAY Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day is all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on yesterdays. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson IN MY SOLITUDE "I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity." ~Albert Einstein "I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude." ~Henry David Thoreau "It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking . . . in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet." ~Franz Kafka "Solitude gives birth to the original in us." ~Thomas Mann "Solitude is the salt of personhood. It brings out the authentic flavor of every experience." ~May Sarton "Talents are best nurtured in solitude: character is best formed in the stormy billows of the world." ~Goethe THE PLAUSIBLE DISAPPEARS "I live alone, entirely alone. I never speak to anyone, never; I receive nothing, I give nothing… When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell something: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends. You let events flow past; suddenly you see people pop up who speak and who go away, you plunge into stories without beginning or end: you make a terrible witness. But in compensation, one misses nothing, no improbability or story, each too tall to be believed in cafes." ~Jean-Paul Sartre CONGRATULATIONS, MISS NELLE ! "I first read Harper Lee's southern gothic story To Kill a Mockingbird when I was 12, at the Brookstone School in Columbus, Georgia. I was too young to fully appreciate the novel's themes, but its compelling characters made a deep and lasting impression, ultimately becoming part of my personal mythology. I've always aspired to be like ATTICUS FINCH: a beloved, respected, tireless crusader and a morally upright community leader. Atticus is educated, honest and articulate, yet free of racial and class prejudice. He does not hold himself to be superior to his neighbors. In fact, he hides his extraordinary skills (for example, he's an expert marksman) until they're necessary. Atticus is the intersection of supreme intellectual confidence and absolute social humility. As it turns out, I'm no Atticus Finch. I'm more like BOO RADLEY: a pale, reclusive, misunderstood shut-in. I keep to myself, emerging for the occasional creative, caring or heroic act. These go, for the most part, unseen, unsung and unpunished. And I'm more like the MOCKINGBIRD: I don't do much but make music for folks to enjoy...(and that's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird). Congratulations, Ms. Lee, on the 50th anniversary of the publication of your masterpiece -- and thank you." ~ D.M. SAIL AWAY "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." ~Mark Twain BECOME A HERO "The noir hero is a knight in blood caked armor. He's dirty and he does his best to deny the fact that he's a hero the whole time. " ~Frank Miller "No hero is mortal till he dies." ~W. H. Auden "No man is a hero in his own country." ~John Monash "One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being." ~May Sarton "I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom." ~Bob Dylan "I think a hero is an ordinary individual who finds strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles." ~Christopher Reeve "And there is no trade or employment but the man following it may become a hero." ~Walt Whitman POKER IN A PITCH DARK ROOM "Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings." ~John F. Kennedy "At the bottom no one in life can help anyone else in life; this one experiences over and over in every conflict and every perplexity: that one is alone. That isn't as bad as it may first appear; and again it is the best thing in life that each should have everything in himself: his fate, his future, his whole expanse and world." ~Rainer Maria Rilke "God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of his own devising, which may be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time." ~Terry Prachett LORD OF THE FLIES "Maybe there is a beast...maybe it's only us." ~William Golding ANOTHER VOICE “You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you.” ~Joseph Campbell "I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken -- and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived." ~Margaret Mitchell "For last year's words belong to last year's language. And next year's words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning." ~T.S. Eliot GET THE PICTURE ? "A picture shows me at a glance what it takes dozens of pages of a book to expound." ~Ivan Turgenev "Un bon croquis vaut mieux qu'un long discours." ~Napoleon Bonaparte "Pictures are better than words because some words are big and hard to understand." ~Peter Griffin STUMBLING-BLOCK OF THE UNCERTAIN "There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized or even cured. The only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private and where food can be poked in to him with a stick." ~Robert A. Heinlein "If isolation tempers the strong, it is the stumbling-block of the uncertain." ~Paul Cezanne "A good artist should be isolated. If he isn't isolated, something is wrong." ~Orson Welles GENERATIVITY VS. STAGNATION "If I am what I have, and if I lose what I have, who then am I?" ~Erich Fromm "It's only after we've lost everything that we are free to do anything." ~Tyler Durden "Is it my imagination, or didn't we arrive in a limo?" ~Rod Tidwell BEGINNER'S MIND "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." ~Charles Darwin "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." ~Bertrand Russell "Being sure of yourself means you're a fool." ~Jenny Holzer Posts 1 - 25 of 673
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