Today I was able to re-connect with several clients and friends, learn Art Farmer's solo on "The Squirrel," check out Donny McCaslin's set @jazzbaltica, study a new twist on a favorite business practice, admire some beautiful photos, peruse the amazing reading list of @Art_Garfunkel, listen to a cool BBC interview with @Jimmy Cobb, read @JasonDCrane's latest poem, and watch a classic Star Trek episode -- all without leaving my solitary bunker in the lonesome desert. Thanks, Internet!
Viewing: Literature - View all posts
BETRAYAL
"You're far too trusting."
—Grand Moff Tarkin
"A true friend stabs you in the front."
—Oscar Wilde
"I know all about the swindles and schemes in this dead-end town.
You got lied to, kid, by the people who are closest to you."
—Mitch Conner
WHAT A FOOL BELIEVES
"A belief is not merely an idea the mind possesses;
it is an idea that possesses the mind."
—Robert Oxton Bolt
"For those who believe, no proof is necessary.
For those who don't believe, no proof is possible."
—Stuart Chase
"The world is divided into two classes:
those who believe the incredible,
and those who do the improbable."
—Oscar Wilde
BETTER
"It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool
than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt."
—Mark Twain
"Tis better to hit an air ball,
than to force a note
that don't wanna come out."
—Nicholas Payton
"Even a bad cup of coffee is better
than no coffee at all."
—David Lynch
LOVE
"I have loved to the point of madness;
That which is called madness,
That which to me, is the only sensible way to love."
—Françoise Sagan
"Love is an irresistible desire
to be irresistibly desired."
—Robert Frost
"Love all, trust a few,
do wrong to none."
—William Shakespeare
"When love is in excess, it brings a man
no honor nor worthiness."
—Euripides
"I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts,
there can be no more hurt, only more love."
—Mother Theresa
"The ultimate choice for a man,
in as much as he is given to transcend himself,
is to create or destroy, to love or to hate."
—Erich Fromm
"I love lamp."
—Brick Tamland
REMEMBERING ERNEST HEMINGWAY On His Birthday
Hemingway On Literature
All good books have one thing in common.
They are truer than if they had really happened.
On Living & Dying
Every man's life ends the same way.
It is only the details of how he lived
and how he died that distinguish
one man from another.
On Company
The only thing that could spoil a day was people.
People were always the limiters of happiness
except for the very few that were
as good as spring itself.
On Action
The shortest answer
is doing the thing.
On Happiness
Happiness in intelligent people
is the rarest thing I know.
On Greatness
Let him think I am more man
than I am and I will be so.
LIKE YOUR MANNERS
“The world was my oyster
but I used the wrong fork.”
—Oscar Wilde
"And now gentlemen,
like your manners,
I must leave you."
—Dylan Thomas
"Good tea.
Nice house."
—Worf
COMMUNITY
"An outsider longing to be on the inside is the same as the soloist longing to work in an ensemble. I get great satisfaction in being a part of the proper -- for me -- community. I'm uncomfortable with various social groupings and clusterings. But when I'm in the right group, doing the right thing, I get as much satisfaction out of that as anyone who does it all the time.
Maybe more."
—George Carlin
“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”
—Kurt Vonnegut
"Gooble-gobble, gooble-gobble!
We accept her! We accept her!
One of us! One of us!"
—Johnny Eck
A FAMILY FEELING
"It's a cliché that's been used to death,
but there is a family feeling when you
work with people on an artistic project."
—George Carlin
"You can't leave, 'cause your heart is there
It's a family affair, it's a family affair."
—Sly Stone
"A man that doesn't spend time with his family
can never be a real man."
—Vito Corleone
THE SENSELESSNESS OF SUFFERING
"What really raises one's indignation against suffering
is not suffering intrinsically, but the
senselessness of suffering."
—Friedrich Nietzsche
"A sad soul can kill you quicker,
far quicker, than a germ."
—John Steinbeck
"It has been said, 'time heals all wounds.'
I do not agree. The wounds remain.
In time, the mind, protecting its sanity,
covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens.
But it is never gone."
—Rose Kennedy
"When a good man is hurt, all who would be called good
must suffer with him."
—Euripides
"Although the world is full of suffering,
it is also full of overcoming it."
—Helen Keller
"The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create,
to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and
to be greater than our suffering."
—Ben Okri
"Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls;
the most massive characters are seared with scars."
—Kahlil Gibran
LONESOME
"An artist is always alone, if he is an artist.
What the artist needs is loneliness."
—Henry Miller
"Loneliness adds beauty to life.
It puts a special burn on sunsets
and makes night air smell better."
—Henry Rollins
"Just a castaway, an island lost at sea, oh
Another lonely day, with no one here but me, oh
More loneliness than any man could bear
Rescue me before I fall into despair, oh."
—Sting
FAITH
“All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust.”
—J. M. Barrie
"To follow by faith alone is to follow blindly."
—Benjamin Franklin
"I find your lack of faith disturbing."
—Darth Vader
HEROES
When I begin to feel frustrated by encroaching banality and mediocrity,
it often helps to contemplate those heroic figures who inspire.
Here are some of them:
William Adama
Douglas Adams
Josef Albers
Muhammad Ali
Louis Armstrong
Paul Atreides
Johann Sebastian Bach
Burt Bacharach
Chet Baker
Maria Bamford
Basho
The Batman
Ludwig van Beethoven
Bill Bell
Irving Berlin
Leonard Bernstein
Wendell Berry
Brian Blade
Eubie Blake
James Bond
Anthony Bourdain
Lester Bowie
Ray Bradbury
Johannes Brahms
Clifford Brown
James Brown
Joseph Campbell
George Carlin
Hoagy Carmichael
Carmine Caruso
Johnny Cash
Tony Cennamo
Marc Chagall
Raymond Chandler
Don Cheadle
Doc Cheatham
Louis CK
Patsy Cline
Jimmy Cobb
Leonard Cohen
Ornette Coleman
John Coltrane
Frank Columbo
Sarah Connor
Paolo Conte
Silvio Dante
Dave the Philosopher
Miles Davis
Philip K. Dick
Emily Dickinson
Eihei Dogen
Nick Drake
Tyler Durden
Lawrence Durrell
Clint Eastwood
Eeyore
Harry "Sweets" Edison
T. S. Eliot
Duke Ellington
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Bill Evans
Art Farmer
Felix the Cat
Boba Fett
Atticus Finch
Ella Fitzgerald
Aretha Franklin
Benjamin Franklin
Lester Freamon
Morgan Freeman
Robert Frost
Hal Galper
Mohandas Gandhi
Paul Gauguin
Marvin Gaye
Theodor Seuss Geisel
Stan Getz
Kahlil Gibran
Raylan Givens
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Darrell Grant
Green Lantern
Christopher Guest
Charlie Haden
Hafiz
Herbie Hancock
Harold (& The Purple Crayon)
Tom Harrell
Robert A. Heinlein
Ernest Hemingway
Joe Henderson
Jimi Hendrix
Bernard Herrmann
Bill Hicks
Alfred Hitchcock
Hit Girl
Billie Holiday
Lena Horne
Aldous Huxley
Icarus
William James
Keith Jarrett
Quincy Jones
James Joyce
Will Kane
Orrin Keepnews
John F. Kennedy
Jack Kerouac
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Evel Knievel
Ray Kurzweil
Tyrion Lannister
Bruce Lee
Stan Lee
John Lennon
Abbey Lincoln
Booker Little
David Lynch
Joseph Maddy
Gustav Mahler
Louis Malle
Nelson Mandela
Thomas Mann
Frank Marocco
Marc Maron
Abraham Maslow
Bill Matheny
Henri Matisse
Carson McCullers
Mr. McFeely
Marian McPartland
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Arthur Miller
Henry Miller
Bryan Mills
Joni Mitchell
Thelonious Monk
James Moody
Morpheus
Eddie Muller
Gerry Mulligan
Will Munny
Anne-Sophie Mutter
Willie Nelson
Pablo Neruda
Mary Oliver
Charlie Parker
Sam Pate
Nicholas Payton
Astor Piazolla
Pablo Picasso
Herb Pomeroy
Alexander Pushkin
Prometheus
Samuel Ramey
Christopher Reeve
Rainer Maria Rilke
James Rockford
Gene Roddenberry
Will Rogers
Sonny Rollins
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Mark Rothko
Bertrand Russell
Ryōkan
Lisbeth Salander
May Sarton
Lalo Schifrin
Maurice Sendak
Rod Serling
Woody Shaw
Jack Sheldon
Wayne Shorter
Frank Sinatra
Derek Sivers
Allen Smith
Mr. Spock
Mary Stallings
Wallace Stevens
Detective Mike Stone
Igor Stravinsky
Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger III
Shunryu Suzuki
Andrei Tarkovsky
Donna Tartt
Clark Terry
Henry David Thoreau
J. R. R. Tolkien
Leo Tolstoy
Desmond Tutu
Mark Twain
Lao Tzu
Morihei Ueshiba
Ultraman
John Updike
Vincent Van Gogh
Ack Van Rooyen
Kurt Vonnegut
Tom Waits
Ben Webster
Simone Weil
Orson Welles
Kenny Werner
Kenny Wheeler
Walt Whitman
Oscar Wilde
Nancy Wilson
Stevie Wonder
Lester Young
SELF KNOWLEDGE
"Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom."
—Aristotle
“Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not.
Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness."
—Tyrion Lannister
"A man's got to know his limitations."
—Dirty Harry
WHY NOT?
"I can tell you the license plate numbers of all six cars outside. I can tell you that our waitress is left-handed and the guy sitting up at the counter weighs two hundred fifteen pounds and knows how to handle himself. I know the best place to look for a gun is the cab of the gray truck outside, and at this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Now why would I know that?"
—Jason Bourne
"Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?"
—Frank the Bunny
"You see things, and you say: why?
But I dream things that never were,
and I say: why not?"
—George Bernard Shaw
DOUBT
"A weak man has doubts before a decision.
A strong man has them afterwards."
—Karl Kraus
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure
and the intelligent are full of doubt."
—Bertrand Russell
"You have to let it all go, Neo: fear, doubt and disbelief."
—Morpheus
STAND BESIDE HER (AND GUIDE HER)
"Man is the only Patriot. He sets himself apart in his own country, under his own flag, and sneers at the other nations, and keeps multitudinous uniformed assassins on hand at heavy expense to grab slices of other people's countries, and keep them from grabbing slices of his. And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood of his hands and works for 'the universal brotherhood of man' with his mouth."
—Mark Twain
"Patriotism is the conviction that your country is superior
to all others because you were born in it."
—George Bernard Shaw
“Patriotism doesn’t automatically equal conservatism.”
—Tony Stark
PRESSURE
"No pressure, no diamonds."
—Thomas Carlyle
"Courage is grace under pressure."
—Ernest Hemingway
"Pressure. It changes everything. Pressure.
Some people, you squeeze them, they focus. Others fold.
Can you summon your talent at will?
Can you deliver on a deadline?"
—John Milton
WHERE THE HEART IS
"Where we love is home,
home that our feet may leave,
but not our hearts."
—Oliver Wendell Holmes
"It’s a funny thing about coming home.
Looks the same, smells the same, feels the same.
You’ll realize what’s changed is you."
—Benjamin Button
"If you get far enough away
you'll be on your way back home."
—Tom Waits
LEGACY
"We all die. The goal isn't to live forever.
The goal is to create something that will."
—Chuck Palahniuk
"If you take the time and your
talent is real...it will last."
—Bill Evans
"Death is powerless against you if you
leave a legacy of good behind."
—The Batman
NOT THE YEARS
"It's not the years in your life that count.
It's the life in your years."
—Abraham Lincoln
"It's not the accumulated credits.
Not the years you've put in.
It's what did you do last week."
—George Carlin
"It's not the years, honey.
It's the mileage."
—Indiana Jones
LOOK WITHIN
"What lies behind us and what lies before us are
tiny matters compared to what lies within us."
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
"One need not be a chamber to be haunted, one need not be a house.
The brain has corridors surpassing material place."
—Emily Dickenson
"The only devils in this world are those running around in our own hearts,
and that is where all our battles should be fought."
—Mahatma Gandhi
NORMAL SCHMORMAL
"We’re all pretty bizarre, some of us are just
better at hiding it, that’s all."
—Andrew Clark
"We all go a little mad sometimes."
—Norman Bates
"Some people never go crazy.
What truly horrible lives they must lead."
—Charles Bukowski
DESTINY
"Mournful and yet grand is the destiny of the artist."
—Franz Liszt
"Men heap together the mistakes of their lives,
and create a monster they call destiny."
—John Hobbes
“The only person you are destined to become
is the person you decide to be.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID
I don't say he's a great man.
Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog.
Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person. You called him crazy... no, a lot of people think he's lost his... balance. But you don't have to be very smart to know what his trouble is. The man is exhausted. A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man. He works for a company thirty-six years this March, opens up unheard-of territories to their trademark, and now in his old age they take his salary away. Are they any worse than his sons?
When he brought them business, when he was young, they were glad to see him. But now his old friends, the old buyers that loved him so and always found some order to hand him in a pinch--they're all dead, retired. He used to be able to make six, seven calls a day in Boston. Now he takes his valises out of the car and puts them back and takes them out again and he's exhausted. Instead of walking he talks now. He drives seven hundred miles, and when he gets there no one knows him anymore, no one welcomes him.
And what goes through a man's mind, driving seven hundred miles home without having earned a cent? Why shouldn't he talk to himself? Why? When he has to go to Charley and borrow fifty dollars a week and pretend to me that it's his pay? How long can that go on? How long? You see what I'm sitting here and waiting for? And you tell me he has no character? The man who never worked a day but for your benefit?
When does he get the medal for that?
~From Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller