Category: quotes

“One of the hardest things to look at in this life is the lives we didn’t lead, the path not taken, potential left unfulfilled. In stories, those who look back — Lot’s wife, Orpheus and Eurydice — are lost. Looking to the side instead, to gauge how our companions are faring, is a way of glancing at a safer reflection of what we cannot directly bear, like Perseus seeing the Gorgon safely mirrored in his shield.”

(From a NY Times opinion piece. I had dinner with an old friend last night and we were going through the list of mutual acquaintances.)

When I’m sick, the first thing I do is stop drinking coffee. It just doesn’t sound good, and that’s kind of like a jug of wine not sounding good to Jack Kerouac (i.e., unlikely). But I got some rest and some Sudafed and October, The Worst Month In Recent Memory, is finally over, so this morning the coffee was back on.

As Dorothy Draper says, “A lot of worse things can be said of a woman than ‘she gives you a good cup of coffee.'”

Yesterday, the poem featured on The Writer’s Almanac was called “Amor Fati,” a phrase I didn’t know. Wikipedia gave me some good stuff:
[The phrase] is used to describe an attitude in which one sees everything that happens in one’s life, including suffering and loss, as good. That is, one feels that everything that happens is destiny’s way of reaching its ultimate purpose, and so should be considered good.

Nietzsche used the concept and phrase a lot; Wikipedia also gave me a good quote from him:
My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. To not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it…but to love it.

I like this concept of amor fati. There has been a lot to deal with in my life lately and I think this is a good approach to it.

In other words…SERENITY NOW!

My trusty sources, The Writers Almanac and Coudal Partners, tell me that today is poet Mary Oliver’s birthday (there’s a nice poem from her about being seventy at the top of the page) and pointed me to a post about “micro-poems” that would translate well to Twitter. That post containted this Mexican proverb:

Cada quien puede hacer de sus calzones un palote
“Anyone is entitled to make a kite out of his pants.”

Third sentence from Out of Africa:

In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.

So it’s a good thing I got a call last night that my quilt will be ready this weekend. I need to get it finished and on the bed before the nights get truly cold.

(I had posts lined up about the sad state of American cooking and about a sad movie about Japanese dolphin-killers, but we don’t need all that sad in the middle of the week.)

So instead, let’s talk about The Random P.G. Wodehouse Quote Generator. He’s been on my list to get around to reading, and now I really need to bump him up to the top of the list, based on these examples:

His first emotion was one of surprise that so much human tonnage could have been assembled at one spot. A cannibal king, beholding them, would have whooped with joy and reached for his knife and fork with the feeling that for once, the catering department had not failed him.

and my particular favorite,
It was obvious that only the fact of his having no soul prevented the iron from entering into it.

It’s the birthday of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the dashing French pilot who wrote Night Flight and Wind, Sand, and Stars–and wrote and illustrated The Little Prince. He was shot down on a reconaissance flight over the Mediterranean in WWII.

Here’s the most famous quote from The Little Prince:

Translated as, “It is only with the heart that one sees rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”