Month: April 2007

A synonym is a word you use when you can’t spell the word you first thought of.

I wouldn’t say I was the best manager in the business. But I was in the top one.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds-and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence.
Hov’ring there I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace,
Where never the lark, nor even eagle flew –
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high, untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

A Canadian Spitfire pilot in the Battle of Britian

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” said Piglet at last,
“what’s the first thing you say to yourself?”
“What’s for breakfast?” said Pooh. “What do you say, Piglet?”
“I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” said Piglet.
Pooh nodded thoughtfully. “It’s the same thing,” he said.

If you’d take your head home and boil it for a turnip it might be useful. I can’t say. But it might.

Tall Nettles

Tall nettles cover up, as they have done
These many springs, the rusty harrow, the plough
Long worn out, and the roller made of stone:
Only the elm butt tops the nettles now.

This corner of the farmyard I like most:
As well as any bloom upon a flower
I like the dust on the nettles, never lost
Except to prove the sweetness of a shower.

Either you think – or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilise and sterilize you.

Be as a bird perched on a frail branch that she feels bending beneath her, still she sings away all the same, knowing she has wings.

Be grateful for luck. Pay the thunder no mind – listen to the birds. And don’t hate nobody.

I make a mistake and everyone can spot it; I tell a lie and no one else knows.

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.

Fly free and happy beyond birthdays and across forever, and we’ll meet now and then when we wish, in the midst of the one celebration that never can end.

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.

The truth is a trap: you can not get it without it getting you; you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you.

Morning

I went out on an April morning
All alone, for my heart was high,
I was a child of the shining meadow,
I was a sister of the sky.

There in the windy flood of morning
Longing lifted its weight from me,
Lost as a sob in the midst of cheering,
Swept as a sea-bird out to sea.

What would you attempt to do if you knew you would not fail?

We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.

It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists, and physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom’s way of knowing about atoms.

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.