Sarcastic Best

“I didn't like the play, but then I saw it under adverse conditions - the curtain was up.”

Groucho Marx

“The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.”

Frank Zappa

“The 100% American is 99% idiot.”

George Bernard Shaw

“The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.”

George Bernard Shaw

“He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.”

Oscar Wilde

“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.”

Oscar Wilde

“I am not young enough to know everything.”

Oscar Wilde

“Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.”

Oscar Wilde

“He was happily married - but his wife wasn't.”

Victor Borge

“I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.”

Mark Twain

“Often it does seem a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.”

Mark Twain

“Honesty is the best policy -- when there is money in it.”

Mark Twain

“Familiarity breeds contempt -- and children.”

Mark Twain

“Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

Mark Twain

“I would like to live in Manchester, England. The transition between Manchester and death would be unnoticeable.”

Mark Twain

“I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.”

Clarence Darrow

“If you ever become a mother, can I have one of the puppies?”

Charles Pierce

“You have delighted us long enough.”

Jane Austen

“A modest little person, with much to be modest about.”

Winston Churchill

“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”

William Faulkner

“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”

Ernest Hemingway

“He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know.”

Abraham Lincoln

“He is a self-made man and worships his creator.”

Irvin S Cobb

“He loves nature in spite of what it did to him.”

Forrest Tucker

“He has Van Gogh's ear for music.”

Billy Wilder

“The old system of having a baby was much better than the new system, the old system being characterized by the fact that the man didn't have to watch.”

Dave Barry

“It is not necesssary to understand things in order to argue about them.”

Caron de Beaumarchais

“Calamities are of two kinds: misfortunes to ourselves, and good fortune to others.”

Ambrose Bierce

“Love: a temporary insanity, curable by marriage.”

Ambrose Bierce

“Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victems he intends to eat until he eats them.”

Samuel Butler

“Sometimes I need what only you can provide: your absence.”

Ashleigh Brilliant

“It's always darkest before it turns absolutely pitch black.”

Paul Newman

“It's a catastrophic success.”

Stephen Bishop

“I feel so miserable without you, it's almost like having you here.”

Stephen Bishop

“History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.”

Abba Eban

“No, Groucho is not my real name. I am breaking it in for a friend.”

Groucho Marx

“How do you feel about women's rights? I like either side of them.”

Groucho Marx

“A man is as young as the woman he feels.”

Groucho Marx

“A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five.”

Groucho Marx

“Marry me and I'll never look at another horse!”

Groucho Marx

“If you find it hard to laugh at yourself, I would be happy to do it for you.”

Groucho Marx

“Marriage is the chief cause of divorce.”

Groucho Marx

“I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception.”

Groucho Marx

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”

Groucho Marx

“I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.”

Groucho Marx

♥£oved♥

We kissed each other until we were too tired to keep going. I could still feel him holding back. It was my penance for what I had done to him. All I could do was hope the walls would fall and that I could have all of him again, but I was always leaving and he was tired of watching me walk away. We both knew that I couldn’t stay and that he couldn’t come with me, but still, we couldn’t let go.
~●~[Kimberly Novosel, Loved]~●~

Q.= WHO AM I?WHO ARE YOU?U.G = You are what you are doing RIGHT NOW!

"If you have the courage to touch life for the first time, you will never know what hit you.  Everything man has thought, felt and experienced is gone, and nothing is put in its place." 

"Whether you are interested in Moksha, Liberation, Freedom, Transformation, you name it, you are interested in happiness without one moment of unhappiness, pleasure without pain, it is the same thing." 

"We don't want to be free from fear. All that we want to do is to play games with it and talk about freeing ourselves from fear." 

"Your constant utilization of thought to give continuity to your separate self is 'you'. There is nothing there inside you other than that." 

"When the movement in the direction of becoming something other than what you are isn't there any more, you are not in conflict with yourself."

[Uppaluri Gopala Krishnamurti]

[Picture courtesy Google]

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) Sonnets

She, to Him

I

When you shall see me in the toils of Time,
My lauded beauties carried off from me,
My eyes no longer stars as in their prime,
My name forgot of Maiden Fair and Free;
When, in your being, heart concedes to mind,
And judgment, though you scarce its process know,
Recalls the excellencies I once enshrined,
And you are irked that they have withered so;
Remembering mine the loss is, not the blame,
That Sportsman Time but rears his brood to kill,
Knowing me in my soul the very same
One who would die to spare you touch of ill!
Will you not grant to old affection's claim
The hand of friendship down Life's sunless hill?

II

Perhaps, long hence, when I have passed away,
Some other's feature, accent, thought like mine,
Will carry you back to what I used to say,
And bring some memory of your love's decline.
Then you may pause awhile and think, "Poor jade!"
And yield a sigh to me--as ample due,
Not as the tittle of a debt unpaid
To one who could resign her all to you
And thus reflecting, you will never see
That your thin thought, in two small words conveyed,
Was no such fleeting phantom-thought to me,
But the Whole Life wherein my part was played;
And you amid its fitful masquerade
A Thought--as I in your life seem to be!

III

I will be faithful to thee; aye, I will!
And Death shall choose me with a wondering eye
That he did not discern and domicile
One his by right ever since that last Good-bye!
I have no care for friends, or kin, or prime
Of manhood who deal gently with me here;
Amid the happy people of my time
Who work their love's fulfilment, I appear
Numb as a vane that cankers on its point,
True to the wind that kissed ere canker came:
Despised by souls of Now, who would disjoint
The mind from memory, making Life all aim,
My old dexterities in witchery gone,
And nothing left for Love to look upon.

IV

This love puts all humanity from me;
I can but maledict her, pray her dead,
For giving love and getting love of thee
Feeding a heart that else mine own had fed!
How much I love I know not, life not known,
Save as one unit I would add love by;
But this I know, my being is but thine own
Fused from its separateness by ecstasy.
And thus I grasp thy amplitudes, of her
Ungrasped, though helped by rough-regarding eyes;
Canst thou then hate me as an envier
Who see unrecked what I so dearly prize?
Believe me, Lost One, Love is lovelier
The more it shapes its moan in selfish-wise.

Hap

If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"
Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.
But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
--Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . .
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

At a Lunar Eclipse

Thy shadow, Earth, from Pole to Central Sea,
Now steals along upon the Moon's meek shine
In even monochrome and curving line
Of imperturbable serenity.
How shall I link such sun-cast symmetry
With the torn troubled form I know as thine,
That profile, placid as a brow divine,
With continents of moil and misery?
And can immense Mortality but throw
So small a shade, and Heaven's high human scheme
Be hemmed within the coasts yon arc implies?
Is such the stellar gauge of earthly show,
Nation at war with nation, brains that teem,
Heroes, and women fairer than the skies?

In the Cemetery

"You see those mothers squabbling there?"
Remarks the man of the cemetery.
"One says in tears, ''Tis mine lies here!'
Another, 'Nay, mine, you Pharisee!'
Another, 'How dare you move my flowers
And put your own on this grave of ours!'
But all their children were laid therein
At different times, like sprats in a tin.
"And then the main drain had to cross,
And we moved the lot some nights ago,
And packed them away in the general foss
With hundreds more. But their folks don't know,
And as well cry over a new-laid drain
As anything else, to ease your pain!"

At the Altar-Rail

"My bride is not coming, alas!" says the groom,
And the telegram shakes in his hand. "I own
It was hurried! We met at a dancing-room
When I went to the Cattle-Show alone,
And then, next night, where the Fountain leaps,
And the Street of the Quarter-Circle sweeps.
"Ay, she won me to ask her to be my wife--
'Twas foolish perhaps!--to forsake the ways
Of the flaring town for a farmer's life.
She agreed. And we fixed it. Now she says:
It's sweet of you, dear, to prepare me a nest,
But a swift, short, gay life suits me best.
What I really am you have never gleaned;
I had eaten the apple ere you were weaned."

The Pity of It

I walked in loamy Wessex lanes, afar
From rail-track and from highway, and I heard
In field and farmstead many an ancient word
Of local lineage like "Thu bist," "Er war,"
"Ich woll," "Er sholl," and by-talk similar,
Nigh as they speak who in this month's moon gird
At England's very loins, thereunto spurred
By gangs whose glory threats and slaughters are.
Then seemed a Heart crying: "Whosoever they be
At root and bottom of this, who flung this flame
Between folk kin tongued even as are we,
"Sinister, ugly, lurid, be their fame;
May their familiars grow to shun their name,
And their brood perish everlastingly."

Restless moment

It is a restless moment.
She has kept her head lowered,
to give him a chance to come closer.
But he could not, for lack of courage.
She turns and walks away.

That era has passed.
Nothing that belonged to it exists any more.

He remembers those vanished years.
As though looking through a dusty window pane,
the past is something he could see, but not touch.
And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.

Song offerings

When the heart is hard and parched up, come upon me with a shower of mercy.

When grace is lost from life, come with a burst of song.

When tumultuous work raises its din on all sides shutting me out from beyond, come to me, my lord of silence, with thy peace and rest.

When my beggarly heart sits crouched, shut up in a corner, break open the door, my king, and come with the ceremony of a king.

When desire blinds the mind with delusion and dust, O thou holy one, thou wakeful, come with thy light and thy thunder.

(Rabindranath Tagore. 'Gitanjali: Song Offerings'. 1912).

The Secret Garden

“She made herself stronger by fighting with the wind.”
[Frances Hodgson Burnett]