There are some knightly souls who even go so far as to make their visits to bookshops a kind of chivalrous errantry at large. They go in not because they need any certain volume, but because they feel that there may be some book that needs them. Some wistful, little forgotten sheaf of loveliness, long pining away on an upper shelf….
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Edward Thomas
The New House
Now first, as I shut the door,
I was alone
In the new house; and the wind
Began to moan.Old at once was the house,
And I was old;
My ears were teased with the dread
Of what was foretold,Nights of storm, days of mist, without end;
Sad days when the sun
Shone in vain: old griefs and griefs
Not yet begun.All was foretold me; naught
Could I foresee;
But I learned how the wind would sound
After these things should be. -
Oliver Herford
Tact is to lie about others as you would have them lie about you.
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W H Auden
Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
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Sophie Hannah
Trainers All Turn Grey
(after Robert Frost’s ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’)You buy your trainers new.
They cost a bob or two.
At first they’re clean and white,
The laces thick and tight.
Then they must touch the ground –
(You have to walk around).
You learn to your dismay
Trainers all turn grey. -
P G Woodhouse
It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.
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Emily Dickinson
Luck is not chance, it’s toil; fortune’s expensive smile is earned.
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Boris Johnson
The source, my friends of half life’s trouble
Is seeking reputation’s bubble,
And though the kids were not ambitious –
Their beds were soft, their food delicious –
Their lives were not entirely cushy:
Their parents were so very pushy.from “The Peril of the Pushy Parents”
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Alan Turing
In any sufficiently powerful logical system statements can be formulated which can neither be proved nor disproved within the system, unless possibly the system itself is inconsistent.
Turing’s restatement of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem.
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Mark Twain
Habit is habit, and not to be flung out the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.
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Cyril Connolly
Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
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Black and Decker
Our users don’t want quarter-inch drills, they want quarter inch holes.
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Douglas Adams
“What was the Sherlock Holmes principle? ‘Once you have discounted the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'”
“I reject that entirely,” said Dirk sharply. “The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks. How often have you been presented with an apparently rational explanation of something that works in all respects other than one, which is just that it is hopelessly improbable? Your instinct is to say, ‘Yes, but he or she simply wouldn’t do that.'”
“Well, it happened to me today, in fact,” replied Kate.
“Ah, yes,” said Dirk, slapping the table and making the glasses jump. “Your girl in the wheelchair — a perfect example. The idea that she is somehow receiving yesterday’s stock market prices apparently out of thin air is merely impossible, and therefore must be the case, because the idea that she is maintaining an immensely complex and laborious hoax of no benefit to herself is hopelessly improbable. The first idea merely supposes that there is something we don’t know about, and God knows there are enough of those. The second, however, runs contrary to something fundamental and human which we do know about. We should therefore be very suspicious of it and all its specious rationality.”
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Nautical Adage
A collision at sea can ruin your entire day
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Percy Bysshe Shelley
A Dirge
Rough wind, that moanest loud
grief too sad for a song;
wild wind, when sullen cloud
knells all the night long:
sad storm, whose tear are vain,
bare woods, whose branches strain,
deep caves and dreary main,
wail for the worlds wrong. -
Robert Frost
The best way out is always through.
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H L Mencken
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
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Hovis Presley
I rely on you
I rely on you
like a Skoda needs suspension
like the aged need a pension
like a trampoline needs tension
like a bungee jump needs apprehension
I rely on you
like a camera needs a shutter
like a gambler needs a flutter
like a golfer needs a putter
like a buttered scone involves some butter
I rely on you
like an acrobat needs ice cool nerve
like a hairpin needs a drastic curve
like an HGV needs endless derv
like an outside left needs a body swerve
I rely on you
like a handyman needs pliers
like an auctioneer needs buyers
like a laundromat needs driers
like The Good Life needed Richard Briers
I rely on you
like a water vole needs water
like a brick outhouse needs mortar
like a lemming to the slaughter
Ryan’s just Ryan without his daughter
I rely on you -
F Scott Fitzgerald
An unread book is just a block of paper.
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Henry David Thoreau
It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders
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Robert Fulghum
The devil made me do it the first time, and after that I did it on my own.
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Hilaire Belloc
Epitaph
When I am dead i hope that it may be said
“His sins were scarlet, but his books were read” -
Oscar Wilde
of George Meredith
His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.
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Horace
It is reason and wisdom which takes away cares, not places affording wide views over the sea.