“And now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain.”
Ode to a Nightingale - John Keats
“And little he knew of the things that ink may do, how it can mark a dead man’s thoughts for the wonder of later years, and tell of happenings that are gone clean away, and be a voice for us out of the dark of time, and save many a fragile thing from the pounding of heavy ages; or carry to us, over the rolling centuries, even a song from lips long dead on forgotten hills.”
Lord Dunsany
“The moral life of man forms part of the subject matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.”
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
“Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an’ death’s the other.”
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) - Tennessee Williams.
“Such sweet compulsion, doth in music lie.”
John Milton - Arcades (1645)
(Source: this--too--shall--pass, via blacksheepboy-)
“This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet—
I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space…
You must grieve for this right now
—you have to feel this sorrow now—
for the world must be loved this much
if you’re going to say ‘I lived’…”
Nazim Hikmet, from “On Living,” trans. Mutlu Konuk and Randy Blasing (via proustitute)
A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg (1742-1799)
Writing a book…
“Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.”
- Winston Churchill
“Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.”
- Barbara W. Tuchman
Oh, NASA…..
We have your satellite if you want it back send 20 billion in Martian money. No funny business or you will never see it again.
— Reportedly seen on a wall in a hall at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, after losing contact with the Mars Polar Lander, 1999.
Rabindranath Tagore - Gitanjali
When I go from here hence, let this be my parting word, that what I have seen is unsurpassable.
“We are born with the dead
See, they return, and bring us with them.”
T.S Eliot, Four Quartets
“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
