Short notes and quotes that otherwise might have fallen by the wayside. Your tumbling guide is Andreas Jungherr.
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“ I’m going away for to leave you love
I’m going away for a while
But I’ll come back
If I go ten thousand miles
The storms are on the ocean
And the heavens may cease to be
This world may lose it’s motion love
If I prove false to thee.
(…)
Storms Are On The Ocean by A. P. Carter
“ Yet Clare’s sharp questions must I shun,
Must separate Constance from the nun
Oh! what a tangled web we weave
When first we practise to deceive!
A Palmer too! No wonder why
I felt rebuked beneath his eye;
Marmion: Canto VI. Stanza 17. By Walter Scott
“ And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the mourning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
William Butler Yeats: “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (1892).
“ The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
Still thou are blest, compared wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!
To a Mouse by Robert Burns
“ Your smile is the sun, ma chère. And fallen men —- we need the sun.
Robbie Coltrane as the Curator in “The Brothers Bloom” (2008) by Rian Johnson
“ Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the gate:
‘To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods.
Horatius by Thomas Babington Macaulay, Lord Macaulay
“ There’s no such thing as an unwritten life. Just a badly written one.
Stephen in “The Brothers Bloom” (2008) written and directed by Rian Johnson
“ Two men looked out from prison bars,
One saw sand, the other, stars.
Unknown cited by Dale Carnegie in ”How to Stop Worrying and Start Living” found via Errol Morris.
“ It has been observed in all ages that the advantages of nature or of fortune have contributed very little to the promotion of happiness; and that those whom the splendour of their rank or the extent of their capacity have placed upon the summits of human life, have not often given any just occasion to envy in those who look up to them from a lower station: whether it be that apparent superiority incites great designs, and great designs are naturally liable to fatal miscarriages; or that the general lot of mankind is misery, and the misfortunes of those whose eminence drew upon them an universal attention have been more carefully recorded, because they were more generally observed, and have in reality been only more conspicuous than those of others, not more frequent, or more severe.
Samuel Johnson: An Account of the Life of Mr Richard Savage (1744)
“ Quite an original:” A phrase, we fancy, rather oftener used by the young, or the unlearned, or the untraveled, than by the old, or the well-read, or the man who has made the grand tour. Certainly, the sense of originality exists at its highest in an infant, and probably at its lowest in him who has completed the circle of the sciences.
Herman Melville: The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade - Chapter 44
“ Don’t know where we’re goin’, but there’s no use bein’ late.
Matthew Quigley in “Quigley Down Under” (1990) written by John Hill
“ Adventures come to the adventurous, and mysterious things fall in the way of those who, with wonder and imagination, are on the watch for them; but the majority of people go past the doors that are half ajar, thinking them closed, and fail to notice the faint stirrings of the great curtain that hangs ever in the form of appearances between them and the world of causes behind.
1st sentences of Algernon Blackwood: The Insanity of Jones (A Study in Reincarnation)
“ We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
William Butler Yeats in “Per Amica Silentia Lunae.” 1917.
“ You have preserved in your own lifetime sir, a way of life that was dead before you were born.
Harold the butler in “A New Leaf” (1971) written and directed by Elaine May cited after Roger Ebert
“ Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.
Song of Solomon 2:15 (King James Version)
