“Winning takes away a little bit of pain,” Roethlisberger said. (NYT)
Category Archives: quotes
the height of skyscrapers
The smallest things made him happy – a blue sky, bicycle bells in the morning, the change of seasons, even the height of skyscrapers.
Pride filled her wrinkles.
– Diane Wei Liang, THE EYE OF JADE
My parents gave me an extra copy of this mystery, having somehow accidentally acquired two (this happens to our family a lot!) in Thanksgiving, and I only just read it now. I found it hard to get into a lot of the writer’s style, but those two lines stood out to me.
and one more thing:
As for rituals, I try not to ever say, “I can’t go out. I have to write.” When I’ve said that in the past inevitably I’ve ended up watching four hours of Forensic Files while the person I’ve said it to ends up writing their magnum opus.
– poet Jillian Weise interviewed in Bookslut
at the end of the journey
Mr. Pinter said he thought of theater as essentially exploratory. “Even old Sophocles didn’t know what was going to happen next,” he said. “He had to find his way through unknown territory. At the same time, theater has always been a critical act, looking in a broad sense at the society in which we live and attempting to reflect and dramatize these findings. We’re not talking about the moon.”
Speaking about his intuitive sense of writing, he said, “I find at the end of the journey, which of course is never ending, that I have found things out.”
– from the NYT article on the life and death of playwright Harold Pinter, who died Wednesday at the age of 78.
worth giving up baseball
[Philip Seymour] Hoffman was the second youngest of four kids. He was raised Catholic and played three sports until a neck injury during wrestling practice forced him, under doctor’s orders, to quit contact sports. “I thought, O.K., I’ll play baseball,” Hoffman said. “ But I’m 14 with a neck brace. I’d see some girl from 10 blocks away, and I’d take it off until she passed me. I was this freckle-faced kid, and I perceived myself as not attractive. When the doctor asked me if I still had pain, I lied. My pact with God was that I would no longer play sports. So instead of trying out for baseball, I auditioned for a play.” Hoffman smiled. “And also there was this beautiful girl. I had a huge crush on her, and she acted. It seemed like something worth giving up baseball for.”
something to keep in mind, perhaps: the self is not the only center: there is a circle to be drawn around every person:
The most sublime act is to set another before you.
– William Blake, Proverbs of Hell, THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL
sweet nothings
I’m writing a poem with some variations on the word “nothing.” Yes, this has been done before. Before, before, and before.
Romeo is banished; and all the world to nothing that he dares ne’er come back to challenge you; or if he do, it needs must be by stealth. Then, since the case so stands as now it doth, I think it best you marry with the county.
– Nurse, ROMEO AND JULIET
(By the way, there’s an old movie called All The World To Nothing, from 1918 – I was hoping to steal that title myself.)
Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.
– Lear, KING LEAR
Is whispering nothing?
Is leaning cheek to cheek? is meeting noses?
Kissing with inside lip? stopping the career
of laughing with a sigh? – a note infallible
Of breaking honesty? – horsing foot on foot?
Skulking in corners? wishing clocks more swift?
Hours, minutes? noon, midnight and all eyes
Blind with the pin and web but theirs, theirs only,
That would unseen be wicked? is this nothing?
Why, then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing;
The covering sky is nothing; Bohemia nothing;
My wife is nothing; nor nothing have these nothings,
If this be nothing.
– Leontes, THE WINTER’S TALE
one long escape from myself
There was no cure for the human condition, he thought, not least his own. He [Samuel Johnson] was a prisoner of compulsions. A monster of a man, with a huge and powerful frame, and a blunt bulldog head set above it, he could pick up warring street dogs and toss them aside like kittens, and once beat an insolent publisher senseless with a folio volume. Yet since his youth he had suffered from a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or even Tourette’s syndrome, which became aggravated with the years. Walking down a London alley, he had to touch every post with his cane, and, if he missed one, would go back and start over; he constantly spoke to himself, repeating half-audible incantations under his breath, and would sit in a reverie for hours, muttering and whistling; when he peeled an orange, he always had to keep the peel in his pocket.
Still, the pill of life could be sweetened – above all, with friendship. Johnson made a religion of social life: he ate with friends every night, adored his small circle of intimates […] “My life is one long escape from myself,” he said, and he ran to the table to get away.
– Critic Adam Gopnik, from “Man of Fetters: Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale,” an article on Samuel Johnson and the new biographies of him, in the 12/8/08 New Yorker.
Dara Weinberg 