You cut up a thing that’s alive and beautiful to find out how it’s alive and why it’s beautiful, and before you know it, it’s neither of those things, and you’re standing there with blood on your face and tears in your sight and only the terrible ache of guilt to show for it.
– Clive Barker
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/213168-you-cut-up-a-thing-that-s-alive-and-beautiful-to
Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.
– Diane Ackerman
In the heat of the evening when the dealing got rough
She was too pat to open and too cool to bluff.
– The Grateful Dead, Scarlet Begonias
http://artsites.ucsc.edu/GDead/agdl/scarlet.html#pat
Found on the profile of a woman who had been married 30+ years to the love of her life. She found what and who she was looking for early on, she said, and felt fortunate.
“Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together.
I’ve got some real estate here in my bag”
So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner pies
And we walked off to look for America
“Kathy,” I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
“Michigan seems like a dream to me now.”
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I’ve gone to look for America
Laughing on the bus
Playing games with the faces
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy
I said “Be careful, his bowtie is really a camera”
“Toss me a cigarette, I think there’s one in my raincoat.”
“We smoked the last one an hour ago.”
So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine
And the moon rose over an open field
“Kathy, I’m lost” I said, though I knew she was sleeping
“I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why…”
Counting the cars on the New Jersey turnpike
They’ve all gone to look for America
All gone to look for America
Original lyrics by Paul Simon. Cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s America by British group Yes, in the 1971 album Fragile.
The original Simon and Garfunkel version.
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The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset fates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
– Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus, poem engraved on the Statue of Liberty
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6359435
I have often said, and oftener think, that this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel — a solution of why Democritus laughed and Heraclitus wept.
– Horace Walpole
He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.