Philotic Web

...a sound marriage, which is a thing to be embarked upon solemnly and with due thought to the consequences and on the understanding that to love is an action, a verb, a thing of choice, and this can be promised and delivered where in love is a more tenuous and fragile thing which may come and go with the wind and the seasons.

Most people, when they pray, have a notion of where the words are going. They have in mind God the Bearded, God the Robed, God the Absent Father sitting on a cloud going through his postbag. My prayer is in a blank envelope, left sitting at a bus stop. Anyone who is interested can pick it up and open it. Anyone, in fact, who wants to be God --to me, at least-- can slip their thumb between the flap and the body of the envelope and crack the seal, and discover my one, solemn wish[...].All they have to do, to get into my personal pantheon, is deliver the appropriate miracle. In the meantime, though, I'm working on the basis that the letter will sit there and get brushed off the back of the bench and into the gutter, and then a rainstorm will wash it into the sewer system where it will get sodden and mouldy, and the ink will fade and the paper turn to sludge, and my prayer will just fade away unread, as they mostly seem to.

We all carry a multitude of ghosts around with us: impressions of other people, strong or weak, deep from long acquaintances or shallow with brevity. Those ghosts are maps, updated with each encounter, made detailed, judged, liked or disliked. They are [...] all we can ever really know of the other people in the world.

...you need to ask that woman to marry you. She's your beating heart and every drop of blood in your veins, but in the small dark hours before the dawn she worries maybe she's not enough.

It's kind of like, when you were a child, or you were a teenager, did you ever do anything you regretted? I'm sure most every person can say that, right? Did I write anything I've regretted? Sure. Can I go back in time and undo it? No. Can you go back in time and undo the time you did *this* to your teacher, or did *this* to your high school crush? No, you can't do that. So, it's sort of there, and I can either bury it as much as I want, or I can have them develop it as a flaw as much as they want...

-Jay Naylor (while drunk, but still seems rather coherent to me)

"You like old jazz?" she asked.
"When I was in high school, I listened to jazz all the time in coffee shops."
"And nowadays?"
"A bit of everything. I hear what people play me."
"But you don't listen of your own choosing?"
"Don't need to."
"My husband was something of a jazz buff. You probably had similar tastes. He was beaten to death in a bus, with an iron vase."
"He what?"
"Some punk was using hair spray in a bus, and when my husband asked him to quite, the guy brained him with an iron vase."
I didn't know what to say. "What was the kid doing carrying an iron vase?"
"Who knows?" she answered. "It was a pitiful way to die."

For Beauty I am not a star,
There are others finer by far.
But my face, I don't mind it,
Because at least I'm behind it.
It's people in FRONT that I jar!

CANADA. IS. SNOW. Seriously. Like a gigantic cosmic middle finger, the snow is falling even now as I look out the window.

So let us hoist a pint of silence
to the East where Ireland lies
We will stare across the waters
For a glimpse of Mary's eyes
We are ships without a harbor
we are sailors on dry land
And the song goes on forever
even though the record can't

If my recommendation means anything to you at all (already I'm flattering myself, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong) you should go read this excerpt from the first chapter of BLACK SWAN GREEN by David Mitchell. And then when that excerpt BLOWS YOUR MIND you should go read the whole book and let it change your life. I'm just saying...

It began in the old and golden days of England, in a time when all the hedgerows were green and the roads dusty, when hawthorn and wild roses bloomed, when big-bellied landlords brewed rich October ale at a penny a pint for rakish high-booted cavaliers with jingling spurs and long rapiers, when squires ate roast beef and belched and damned the Dutch over their claret while their faithful hounds slumbered on the rushes by the hearth, when summers were long and warm and drowsy, with honeysuckle and hollyhocks by cottage walls, when winter nights were clear and sharp with frost-rimmed moons shining on the silent snow, and Claud Duval and Swift Nick Nevison lurked in the bosky thickets, teeth gleaming beneath their masks as they heard the rumble of coaches bearing paunchy well-lined nabobs and bright-eyed ladies with powdered hair who would gladly tread a measure by the wayside with the gallant tobyman, and bestow a kiss to save their husbands' guineas; an England where good King Charles lounged amiably on his throne, and scandalised Mr Pepys (or was it Mr Evelyn?) by climbing walls to ogle Pretty Nell; where gallants roistered and diced away their fathers' fortunes; where beaming yokels in spotless smocks made hay in the sunshine and ate bread and cheese and quaffed foaming tankards fit to do G. K. Chesterton's heart good; where threadbare pedlars with sharp eyes and long noses shared their morning bacon with weary travellers in dew-pearled woods and discoursed endlessly of 'Hudibras' and the glories of nature; where burly earringed smugglers brought their stealthy sloops into midnight coves, and stowed their hard-run cargoes of Hollands and Brussels and fragrant Virginia in clammy caverns; where the poachers of Lincolnshire lifted hares and pheasants by the bushel and buffeted gamekeepers and jumped o'er everywhere . . .

As he was passing by the house where Jeff Thatcher lived, he saw a new girl in the garden -- a lovely little blue-eyed creature with yellow hair plaited into two long-tails, white summer frock and embroidered pantalettes. The fresh-crowned hero fell without firing a shot. A certain Amy Lawrence vanished out of his heart and left not even a memory of herself behind. He had thought he loved her to distraction; he had regarded his passion as adoration; and behold it was only a poor little evanescent partiality. He had been months winning her; she had confessed hardly a week ago; he had been the happiest and the proudest boy in the world only seven short days, and here in one instant of time she had gone out of his heart like a casual stranger whose visit is done.

source, Adam?

One of the reasons why Tom's mind had drifted away from its secret troubles was, that it had found a new and weighty matter to interest itself about. Becky Thatcher had stopped coming to school. Tom had struggled with his pride a few days, and tried to "whistle her down the wind," but failed. He began to find himself hanging around her father's house, nights, and feeling very miserable. She was ill. What if she should die! There was distraction in the thought. He no longer took an interest in war, nor even in piracy. The charm of life was gone; there was nothing but dreariness left. He put his hoop away, and his bat; there was no joy in them any more. His aunt was concerned. She began to try all manner of remedies on him. She was one of those people who are infatuated with patent medicines and all new-fangled methods of producing health or mending it. She was an inveterate experimenter in these things. When something fresh in this line came out she was in a fever, right away, to try it; not on herself, for she was never ailing, but on anybody else that came handy. She was a subscriber for all the "Health" periodicals and phrenological frauds; and the solemn ignorance they were inflated with was breath to her nostrils. All the "rot" they contained about ventilation, and how to go to bed, and how to get up, and what to eat, and what to drink, and how much exercise to take, and what frame of mind to keep one's self in, and what sort of clothing to wear, was all gospel to her, and she never observed that her health-journals of the current month customarily upset everything they had recommended the month before. She was as simple-hearted and honest as the day was long, and so she was an easy victim. She gathered together her quack periodicals and her quack medicines, and thus armed with death, went about on her pale horse, metaphorically speaking, with "hell following after." But she never suspected that she was not an angel of healing and the balm of Gilead in disguise, to the suffering neighbors.

Seriously, what is up with Illinois?

Guys, I should not have to tell you how much of a pimp move it is to cook your date dinner, especially at your place. Its too strong. Unblockable, 80% damage ultra combo. Even if you can't cook for s***, learn how to make at least ONE dish, and then offer to cook it for the girl you are interested in.

Hey, it got me married.

"It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people."

There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.

Bender! You can't date the ship! It would be like me dating a really fat lady, and then living inside her! And she'd be all vrrrroooom vrwooo bweeee zooom!

"I firmly believed that if I continued to define the life that I wanted, continued to focus on it with all of my intention, and was ready to claim it with all my heart, eventually the universe would provide it for me."

You could slit my throat and with my one last gasping breath, I'd apologize for bleeding on your shirt.

Product Description
Can you resist the allure of Edward’s myriad charms—his ocher eyes and tousled hair, the cadence of his speech, his chiseled alabaster skin, and his gratuitous charm? Will you hunt surreptitiously and tolerate the ceaseless deluge in Forks to evade the sun and uphold the facade? Join Edward and Bella as you learn more than 600 vocabulary words to improve your score on the *SAT, ACT®, GED®, and SSAT® exams!

Product Description
Can you resist the allure of Edward’s myriad charms—his ocher eyes and tousled hair, the cadence of his speech, his chiseled alabaster skin, and his gratuitous charm? Will you hunt surreptitiously and tolerate the ceaseless deluge in Forks to evade the sun and uphold the facade? Join Edward and Bella as you learn more than 600 vocabulary words to improve your score on the *SAT, ACT®, GED®, and SSAT® exams!

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ ... nningsh-20

I liked the way the writer of the product description mis used the word gratuititous, unless of course Meyer misuses it the same way, in which case it is brilliant.

Just thought I would add one of my own...

"If someone is going to be judged they should be not be judged by their past, but by what they are doing with there future"

-Brian Baker

A response: "Nay, they be should not be judged by neither there past, nor there future, nor there present, but only by there ability to sound completely unnatural and awkward when them be quoting thereselves."

Ah, so it's a smart pirate accent, you see.