Ruminations

"This general died in a trench dug in snow, high in the mountains, wearing an Alpine hat with an eagle feather in it and a hole in front you couldn't put your little finger in and a hole in back you could put your fist in, if it were a small fist and you wanted to put it there..."

~ Ernest Hemingway, "A Natural History of the Dead"

"From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away."

~ Raymond Chandler, The High Window

"This is the moment when I know that a sign reading 'To Versailles,' or a sign reading 'To Suresnees,' any and all signs point to this or that place, should be ignored, that one should always go toward the place for which there is no sign. This is the moment when the deserted street on which I have chosen to sit is throbbing with people and all the crowded streets are empty. This is the moment when any restaurant is the right restaurant so long as it was not indicated to you by somebody."

~ Henry Miller, Black Spring

"What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?"

~ Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

"People will always be tempted to wipe their feet on anything with 'welcome' written on it."

~ Andy Partridge, "Snowman"

"I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul. It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance!"

~ Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

"I hate quotations."

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, journal entry