Have you lately run across any quotes, pieces of literature, poetry, etc., that have struck a chord with you that you would like to share?

I referred to the essay that this came from in an earlier topic – not hard to find if you’re interested – this was another part of the same essay:

“Contemplate the power of the phrase, “Shock and awe.” Plainly, if the Kaiser had only had shock and awe to employ on the march through Belgium in 1914, France would be speaking German today. It was only the lack of shock and awe that saved Britain during the Battle of Britain. Ney stood there at Waterloo, vainly shouting for Napoleon to, “Send in the shock and awe! Send in the shock and awe!.” Why, before the power of shock and awe, even the Emperor Mong stands helpless.

“How do we know this? We know it because Tommy Franks’ staff prepared a plan, which was submitted, for the invasion of Iraq. That plan was initially rejected, as being sadly deficient in shock and awe. So Franks’ staff took the exact same plan, added in the phrase “shock and awe” something like 127 times, if I remember the number correctly, and it was then approved.” 3

The #3 footnote: This is the sober truth.

“Sometimes I’m terrified of my heart; of it’s constant hunger for whatever it is it wants. The way it stops and starts.” Edgar Allen Poe

“If vodka was water… and I was a duck… I’d swim to the bottom and never come up… But vodka’s not water and I’m not a duck… So slide me a bottle and shut the fuck up.” unknown toaster

The response from Bill Cosby when asked what his favorite color is:

“Don’t know. I think, first of all, it depends on if you’re wearing it or if you see it, and sometimes my favorite color would be green, which means that we’re not in a drought. Sometimes my favorite color might be brown, because we’re landing safely. Sometimes my favorite color might be white, because we had a great snow, and the morning I wake up and I see it.”

My own poetry….for women in Men-O-Pause

The Hormone Defense

In the wee hours of the morning
my hormones rock-n-roll
I wander to the kitchen
and towards the candy bowl

I’m faint of heart and clammy skinned
The house is very still
That hot flash got me thinking
I’d like to watch ” Kill Bill.”

I unwrap a bit of chocolate
medicinal of course
Thirty Seven pieces later
still I feel no remorse

I ponder moving to Great Briton
where PMS is a defense
Hormonal crimes of passion
need not have to make much sense

It could be as simple as
“He brushed against my tender breast”
The last thing I remember is the ice pick in his chest

I’d laugh aloud, “I’m sure a nut”
I didn’t mean to do it
It happened so very fast
I know, I know I blew it!

The judge and jury would convene
united they’d agree
To serve a lengthy sentence
of tea and sympathy

and with great understanding
of a womans fragile hell
they’d pass the hat to buy me lunch’
and order Taco Bell.

“Every time you feel yourself getting pulled into other peoples nonsense repeat these words,
’Not my Circus, not my Monkeys”
Attributed to {{Polish Proverb}}

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

T. S. Eliot

And also from him:

“For us there is only the trying,
the rest is not our business.”

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/t/tseliot109032.html#eGz18bwFf9vM0z0T.99

I just rediscovered this Teddy Roosevelt quote:

””[these men] combine to bring about as much financial stress as possible, in order to discredit the policy of the government and thereby secure a reversal of that policy, so that they may enjoy unmolested the fruits of their own evil-doing. . . I regard this contest as one to determine who shall rule this free country—the people through their governmental agents, or a few ruthless and domineering men whose wealth makes them peculiarly formidable because they hide behind the breastworks of corporate organization.”

For some reason I thought that post ^^ was from @CWOTUS and was shocked!

A poem called Vampire.

TLDR; here’s a part of it;

’‘All around, on starless nights,
Myriad hosts of livid lights
Flicker fretfully, revealing
At its foot a phantom, kneeling
Whilst it jabbers dismal plaints,
Cursing God and all the saints.’’

The Rape Joke by Patricia Lockwood.

Good of you to ask. I collect short ones.

“He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle to steady his fellow countrymen and hearten those Europeans upon whom the long dark night of tyranny had descended.”
—Edward R. Murrow, American journalist, on Winston Churchill, 1954

“Breathe with unconditioned breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensioned life; stay away from screens.”
Wendell Berry

“Thanks for this day, for all the birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life.” 
Barbara Kingsolver

“When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race.” H.G. Wells

“Does it really matter what…..affectionate people do—so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses?” Mrs. Patrick Campbell

Wedlock – the deep, deep peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue.” – Mrs. Patrick Campbell

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Mary Oliver

“The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” Oscar Wilde

“The joy that isn’t shared dies young.” Anne Sexton

“Hell is full of musical amateurs.” GB Shaw

“Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.” Henry David Thoreau (allegedly)

You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer. Frank Zappa

Beer makes you feel the way you ought to feel without beer. Henry Lawson

And, of course, in case you all were wondering . . .

Whiskey’s to tough, Champagne costs too much, Vodka puts my mouth in gear. I hope this refrain, Will help me explain, As a matter of fact, I like beer. Tom T. Hall

@gailcalled An old friend of mines email is “thoreaume” haha

I’m going to marry Michael Lee.

Most recent….

Time is luck. – by Gwen Stacy in her high-school valedictory address from the latest Spiderman movie.

This from Nights in White Satin:

“Breathe deep the gathering gloom
Watch lights fade from every room
Bedsitter people look back and lament
Another day’s useless energy spent

Impassioned lovers wrestle as one
Lonely man cries for love and has none
New mother picks up and suckles her son
Senior citizens wish they were young

Cold hearted orb that rules the night
Removes the colors from our sight
Red is grey and yellow white
But we decide which is right
And which is an illusion?”

@Dan_Lyons , I have that memorized from listening to it so many times as a teen but I still don’t really get it. I think I DID get it when I was stoned though.

If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. Rachel Carson

One of my all time favorites, posted this here somewhere yesterday actually

“Leave it to me to put all of my eggs in one bastard.” Dorothy Parker

@Judi It’s funny how so much music from the 60s/70s required the volume to be turned to the max and the listener to be stoned to the gills!

Oh man…a few summers ago I put on the Grateful Deads “Terrapin Station” album I have on my computer and got high and went out and laid in my hot tub diggin’ the tunes. Perfect, perfect, perfect. lol

I just opened youtube and started up Terrapin Station! I haven’t heard this in 35 years!

(check out the video!)

@Dan_Lyons Awesome album! Enjoy!

This is a cute spoken word poem.

“Rules are like witches. If you don’t believe in their power, they can’t get you.”
__Jennifer King Moody__

“There is a difference between nature’s insidious destruction and that wrought by man. Nature kills with dignity.”

__Bobbye S. Wicke__

The Party To Which You Are Not Invited, by Stephen Dunn

You walk in, your clothes dark
and strangely appropriate, an arrogance
about you as if you had a ramrod
for a spine. You feel posture-perfect.

When you speak, women move away.
You smile, and men see tombstones.
They think they know who you are,
that they could throw you out

as they could one man. But today you are
every man who has been omitted
from any list: how quickly they see
they would have no chance.

You pour yourself a drink,
as if ready to become one of them.
Under your skin, nerve endings, loose
wires, almost perceivable. Something

somewhere is burning. You tell them
you’ve dreamed of moments like this,
to be in their lovely house,
to have everyone’s attention. You ask

of the children, are they napping?
You extend your hand to the host,
who won’t take it, reminds you
you were not invited, never will be.

You have things in your pockets
for everybody. House gifts.
Soon you’ll give them out.
If only they could understand

how you could be ruined
by kindness, how much
you could love them
if they knew how to stop you.

The trees, like so many other things that make up our childhood, were killed by progress.Their deaths were planned twelve miles away in the county seat by people who had never seen them;condemned by those who had never stood in their comforting shade or listened to them whisper in the wind in their lisping, leafy voices. They didn’t die because of passion or anger or prolonged age or for any reason that would have been understandable. They died because they were in the way.

__Michael Hargraves__

Wow. Thank you everybody. All of it is good. Very good. I enjoyed reading all of them. And I always appreciate it when you leave behind some lurve, even if it rarely increases my score anymore, it does mean something. Many of my favorite flutherites showed up and it is always good to see what you’ve been looking at, reading, etc.

I think this thread is sufficiently dead now to allow me to contribute without committing some unwritten faux pas. I’d run across a couple of meaningful lines in the past few weeks and I’d supposed you all had as well, which is what gave rise to the question above.

“You have to create the quiet to be able to listen to the very faint voice of your intuition.” ~Jon Favreau

”We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up… discovering we have the strength to stare it down.” ~Eleanor Roosevelt

Lately, my favorite is the poetry found in the dialogue of Eugene O’Niell’s last plays. The following strikes home with me, it strikes deep.

Edmund: “I was on the Squarehead square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the Trades. The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and signing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself—actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way.”

Stage Direction: He silently stares down at his glass. Then, in two audible gulps, drains it. Coughs. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and continues…

“And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience, became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint’s vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see, and seeing the secret, you are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on towards nowhere for no good reason.”

Stage Direction: He grins wryly. Looks down into his empty glass…

“It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death.”

~Edmund‘s Soliloquy, Act IV, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, by Eugene O’Neill, 1940.

The political quotes above remind me of one by a much ignored president, Harry Truman. It was 1948 and he was doing whistle stop speeches from the back of a Pullman car in order to get his first elected term. When he raised his voice, he sounded just like Ross Perot. All reedy with a drawl. He was talking about his Republican opponent, backed heavily by Wall Street money, corporate money. He was talking to farmers and laborers. He was screaming at them.

“How many times? HOW MANY TIMES, FOLKS? (Whacks his own head with a rolled-up newspaper) HOW MANY TIMES DOES A FELLA HAVE TO BE BEATEN (Whack!) OVER (Whack!) THE HAID (Whack! Whack!) BEFORE HE REALIZES WHO’S DOIN’ THE BEATIN’?! (Shakes newspaper at the audience.)

He was funny when he was mad. God, we’ve had so many warnings from so many different people who knew.