Cottleston, cottleston, cottleston pie,
A fly can’t bird, but a bird can fly.
Ask me a riddle and I reply,
Cottleston, cottleston, cottleston pie.

History is the record of an encounter between character and circumstances.

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.

The wise man has long ears, big eyes and a short tongue.

Love

The difficult part of love
Is being selfish enough,
Is having the blind persistence
To upset an existence
Just for your own sake.
What cheek it must take.

And then the unselfish side-
How can you be satisfied,
Putting someone else first
So that you come off worst?
My life is for me.
As well ignore gravity.

Still, vicious or virtuous,
Love suits most of us.
Only the bleeder found
Selfish this wrong way round
Is ever wholly rebuffed,
And he can get stuffed.

Take this for a general rule: every decision that is established so strongly that it may not be changed under any possible circumstance, that decision, I say, is wicked.

The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.

Arrows Of Light

Arrows of light, come
Pierce my soul
Pierce my soul

Breath of the bright wind
Make us one
Make us one

Life is singing
Like a great bell ringing

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

We must believe in free will – we have no choice.

The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may enter, the rain may enter – but the King of England cannot enter; all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!

Answers

I keep my answers small and keep them near;
Big questions bruised my mind but still I let
Small answers be a bulwark to my fear.

The huge abstractions I keep from the light;
Small things I handled and caressed and loved.
I let the stars assume the whole of night.

But the big answers clamoured to be moved
Into my life. Their great audacity
Shouted to be acknowledged and believed.

Even when all small answers build up to
Protection of my spirit, I still hear
Big answers striving for their overthrow

And all the great conclusions coming near.

I didn’t fail 12,000 times inventing the light bulb. I found 12,000 ways not to invent the light bulb.

The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There’s not one of them which won’t make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it isn’t. If you leave out justice you’ll find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials “for the sake of humanity” and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.

Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as you ever can.

I am definitely the best King in England at the moment.

Three things can’t be hidden: poverty, love and coughing.

In order to retain a certain respect for sausages and laws, one must not see them being made.

Night Growing Late

Night Growing Late
Sound of charcoal
broken on charcoal

Oh this hectic world
Three whole days
unseen the cherry blossom

Bad tempered
I got back
Then in the garden the willow tree

Then look at the light
Yes there is a wind
This night of snow

…it was like sending a criminal who has broken all the laws in one country into another where the laws were different in the expectation that there he would be law abiding.

There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it behoves all of us not to talk about the rest of us.

My Ocelot would laugh a lot
And when he was elated
His fur would shake his nostrils quake
Until he oscillated

The fire at the manufacturing plant was due to friction caused by a large inventory rubbing up against an Insurance policy.

Simplicity of life, even the barest, is not a misery, but the very foundation of refinement: a sanded floor and whitewashed walls, and the green trees, and flowery meads, and living waters outside; or a grimy palace amid the smoke with a regiment of housemaids always working to smear the dirt together so that it may be unnoticed; which, think you, is the most refined, the most fit for a gentleman of those two dwellings?

All that Shakespeare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself.

Long time I ploughed the ocean wide,
A life of toil I spent;
But now in harbour safe arrived
From care and discontent.

My anchor’s cast, my sails are furled,
And now I am at rest;
Of all the ports throughout the world,
Sailors, this is the best.

(in Hessle Cemetery, Hull)

I have no special talents I am only passionately curious.

History: a distillation of rumour.

Come to the edge.
We might fall.
Come to the edge.
It’s too high!
COME TO THE EDGE!
And they came,
and he pushed,
And they flew.

How to work better.

1. Do one thing at a time
2. Know the problem
3. Learn to listen
4. Learn to ask questions.
5. Distinguish sense from nonsense
6. Accept change as inevitable
7. Admit mistakes
8. Say it simple
9. Be calm
10. Smile


Peter Fischli & David Weiss

All beginnings are delightful and the threshold is the place to pause.