Category: Quotes

“To Fear Love…”

“To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.” – Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals

Escape –
It’s all he really sought.
The certitudes of power games beyond the touch of anything like love —

And he had always found the ones who still believed;
The having of them, simple, as
They gave and gave without those second thoughts
That haunted him if he thought he was losing —

But money’s curse:
To have enough that others use you for it –
This happened to him, finally, as he,
Who thought he understood the rules, found out.

There’s nothing so pathetic
As an aging man who does not know what to do
When the women attracted to him are no longer
Young, or drunk, or (preferably) both.

He never understood the mechanism
That attracted these women to him,
So he missed it’s passing.

And now he knows,
The realization blinding as the sunrise:
He can always pay for companionship,
But now he only gets the kind that
He, previously, gave —

And wow, what power.

To know his companion only wants what he has,
Not him.
This must have been what…
What was her name? ..
Felt like

That night she cried as she packed —

Hangovers are so much harder than they used to be

And God, he feels old

To K****

What is love? ‘Tis not hereafter.
Present mirth hath present laughter.
What’s to come is still unsure.

In delay there lies no plenty.
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty.
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

– Shakespeare, “Twelfth Night”

Yes, I played the fool:
But it was love, I swear it was —

For young though we were then,
We knew the world, the stars above,
We knew the truth,
And we knew love.

What pride had I,
To lose control?
To let her steal my will,
Toy with my soul?

For young though I was then,
I knew the face, the shoulders I dreamed of:
I knew the agony of hope,
And truly, very truly, I knew love.

I sat upon a couch of sorts,
Amid unspoken prayers:
I saw her sitting on the stairs,
She looked at me as though I was the one,
The only one:
The sole and ever only one –
Because I knew her pain and wouldn’t draw away —

For young though she was then,
She’d known the bruise the scream the shove;
She longed for freedom to be hers,
And she knew love, yes – she knew love.

I played the fool to escort her
From danger out to safety –
She loved me with the passion of
A thousand burning suns.
We loved with inexperience, our
Clumsiness turned into something stately –
And many times – the first time – was
A thousand more than once —

And how she wept upon my shoulder
Dreaming of tomorrow;
And where her soul flew to at night
I never understood –
But what she had to give, she’d never
Let a vagrant borrow,
Then she left me for better, and
For good.

But there: the fool who plays at love,
Who loves with all ignominy —

When I heard what had come of her,
I thought of her sad dignity,
That would not be held down,
Or trapped,
Restricted by the hidden threads of fate —

Who ran away not far enough,
And left a life

Too early and
Too late

Vitae Summa Brevis by Ernest Dowson

“The brief sum of life forbids us the hope of enduring long.”

–Horace

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

Favorite Movie Quotes – Nicholas Nickleby

In every life, no matter how full or empty one’s purse, there is tragedy. It is the one promise life always fulfills. Thus, happiness is a gift, and the trick is not to expect it, but to delight in it when it comes, and to add to other people’s store of it.

What happens if, too early, we lose a parent, that party on whom we rely for only — everything? What did these people do when their families shrank? They cried their tears, but then they did the vital thing. They built a new family, person by person. They came to see that family need not be defined merely as those with whom they share blood, but as those for whom they would give their blood.

– Douglas McGrath, “Nicholas Nickleby”

Beleaguered Thoughts

… that I have all the time.

It’s easy for me to be moral,
I’m unattractive

I once wrote a novel
I’ve waited eight years
It’s never written back

I enjoy reading blogs by people
Who do the kinds of things I would never do
Such as
Having friends they actually spend time with

My son got a job today
He had been without one for four months
After reading this post
I left work and drove the long way
To see him at work
Which he seemed to appreciate
So, Thanks Dana

There’s very little coherence in this post
Which is, I suppose, part of its point