I hear the roar of a big machine, two worlds and inbetween...

I have kept a file for ages of quotes from people I know. However, there are tons of quotes from famous people and lyrics and all that I adore and often put in my planfile over and over. So, this page is basically a collection of things that were either in my planfile or should have been at some point or another. The three easiest ways to group it is into quotes, book excerpts, and poetry, and maybe after I collect enough of them I can even subgroup those by alphabetical order or something. I was originally going to do lyrics but I think most of them just qualify as quotes.

2/20/99 - today I decided to make the poems page separate, because it was of such a different nature than the rest of the page. So now you can find the poems I like here.

[ quotes ][ books ][ poetry ]

quotes
"Have you even been in love? Horrible, isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life... You give them a piece of you. They don't ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like `maybe we should just be friends' or `how very perceptive' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love."
-- Neil Gaiman
"Well, I found the secret to life: I'm okay when everything is not okay."
-- Tori Amos
"Cookie stand's not part of the food court."
"Sure it is."
"The food court is downstairs. The cookie stand is upstairs. It's not like we're talking quantum physics here!"
"The cookie stand is an eatery, an eatery is part of the food court."
"Bullshit! Eateries that operate within the designated square downstairs qualify as food court, anything operating outside the said designated square is considered an autonomous unit for mid-mall snacking."
-- T.S. and Brodie, from Kevin Smith's _Mallrats_
"it's harder to be friends than lovers
and you shouldn't try to mix the two
because if you do it and you're still unhappy
then you know that the problem is you."
-- Liz Phair
"Oh mercy, what I won't give
to have the things that mean the most not to mean the things i miss
unforgiving, the choice still is
the language or the kiss"
-- Indigo Girls
"When all around you is strife and uncertainty.. there's nothing like a good old-fashioned plate of.. SARDINES!"
-- Noises Off
"I'm not in S..pain, I'm in AGONY!"
-- Noises Off
"My strange and self-abuse
Is the initiate fear that wants hard use.
We are yet but young in deed."
-- Shakespeare, _Macbeth_
"Why do you hate me so much? All I ever did was like you."
-- Annette, in Saturday Night Fever
"Guys are exactly like tapeworms, except for being slightly less likely to help with the dishes."
-- Dave Barry
"Chiriko! How've you been?"
"Not well. I've been dead."
-- Fushigi Yuugi, episode 51
"It has people and furniture. It's a perfect American story."
-- South Park
"Sometimes you accidentally input an extra digit into the year: i.e, 19993 and you add 18,000 years on to *now*, and you realize that the year 19993 will one day exist and that time is a scary thing, indeed."
-- Douglas Coupland, _Microserfs_
"I'm offering you my body, and you're offering me semantics?"
-- Caitlin, in Kevin Smith's _Clerks_
"It's wrong, Diablo. It's wrong to kill game show hosts."
-- Jon Rosenberg, Goats
"When this grey world crumbles like a cake, I'll be hanging from the hope that I'll never see that recipe again."
-- They Might Be Giants
"Contrariwise", continued Tweedledee, "If it was so, it might be: and if it were so, it would be: but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."
-- Lewis Carroll
"The more you love, the more you *can* love - and the more intensely you love. Nor is there any limit on how many you can love. If a person had time enough, he could love all of the majority who are decent and just."
-- Robert A. Heinlein
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house."
-- Robert A. Heinlein
"If you happen to be one of the fretful minority who can do creative work, never force an idea; you'll abort it if you do. Be patient and you'll give birth to it when the time is ripe. Learn to wait.."
-- Robert A. Heinlein
"Oh, how I wish I were a trinity, so if I lost a part of me, I'd still have two of the same to live..."
-- Indigo Girls
"I'm coming to the conclusion about the human subconscious... that, no matter how you look at it, machines really *are* our subconscious. I mean, people from outer space didn't come down to earth and make machines for us... *we* made them ourselves. So machines can only be products of our being, and as such, windows into our souls... by monitoring the machines we build, and the sorts of things we put into them, we have this amazingly direct litmus as to how we are evolving."
-- Douglas Coupland, _Microserfs_
"It starts out young - you try not to be different just to survive - you try to be just like everyone else - anonymity becomes reflexive - and then one day you wake up and you've *become* all those other people - the others - the something you aren't. And you wonder if you can ever be what you really *are*. Or you wonder if it's too late to find out."
-- Douglas Coupland, _Microserfs_
"Naught's had, all's spent
When our desire is got without content;
'Tis safer to be that which we destroy
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.
-- Shakespeare, "Macbeth"
"Things without all remedy
Should be without regard. What's done is done."
-- Shakespeare, "Macbeth"
"Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the universe."
-- Kurt Vonnegut, _Hocus Pocus_
"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug."
-- Mark Twain, _Notebooks_
"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."
-- Bertrand Russell
"The supreme conviction in life is the notion that one is loved."
-- Victor Hugo
"If everybody minded their own business," the Duchess said in a hoarse growl, "the world would go round a deal faster than it does."
-- Lewis Carroll
"...the humanist is thus not wrong to trust to the possibility of such universal values; it is just that nobody can yet say exactly what they would be, since the conditions which might allow them to flourish have not yet come into being. If they were ever to do so, the theorist could relievedly lay down his or her theorizing, which would have been made redundant precisely by being politically realized, and do something more interesting for a change."
-- Terry Eagleton, _Literary Theory_
"Silence may be an excellent virtue in a woman, but it is a highly debatable accomplishment in a bridge player. If you sit quietly by, with your thirteen cards clutched tightly in your little hands, be resigned to having the opposition bid around you, over you, and through you. In short, silence breeds defeat. You haven't a ghost of a chance! The modern-day players bid too well for you to grow fat on their errors."
-- Sidney Silodor
"Existentialism was created so starving poets could sit around in coffee shops twirling their goatees, drinking expresso, and smoking cigarettes while discussing how despair is sexually appealing, which it isn't."
-- unknown
"...what depresses me so excessively is the fact that such a receptive person as my wife was should die with all that enormous knowledge which I conveyed to her, that she should have taken that enormous knowledge into death with her, that is the worst enormity, an enormity far worse than the fact that she is dead, he said. We force and we stuff every- thing within us into such a person and then that person leaves us, dies on us, forever, he said. Added to it is the suddenness of it, the fact that we did not foresee the death of that person, not for one moment did I foresee the death of my wife, I looked upon her just as if she had eternal life, never thought of her death, he said, just as if she really lived with my knowledge right into infinity as an infinity, he said. Really a precipitate death, he said. We take such a person for eternity, that is the mistake. Had I known she was going to die on me I should have acted entirely differently, as it was I did not know she was going to die on me and before me, so I acted utterly senselessly, just as though she existed infinitely unto infinity, whereas she was not made for infinity at all but for finiteness, like all of us. Only if we love a person with such unbridled love as I loved my wife do we in fact believe that person will live forever and into infinity."
-- Thomas Bernhard, _Old Masters_
"Let me take your hand, I'm shaking like milk."
-- the cure
The more I sort it out, the more it gets distorted
I sort of think I'm better off just leaving it unsorted
The more I try to change my course the more off course I go
Of course I'll reach my destination -- someday, I suppose!
-- "Someday I Suppose", The Mighty Mighty Bosstones
"When you're getting tired of normal
You sometimes think you've lost your will
You see something less formal
And reconcile to try to move in for the thrill
Was it breaking down like most do?
Or searching for happiness where you're supposed to?"
-- Moxy Fruvous, "Fly"
"They say that absence makes the heart grow fungus."
-- Barenaked Ladies
"The Web brings people together because no matter what kind of a twisted sexual mutant you happen to be, you've got millions of pals out there. Type in 'Find people that have sex with goats that are on fire' and the computer will say, 'Specify type of goat.'"
-- Rich Jeni
If I don't drive around the park,
I'm pretty sure to make my mark.
If I'm in bed each night by ten,
I may get back my looks again.
If I abstain from fun and such,
I'll probably amount to much;
But I shall stay the way I am,
Because I do not give a damn.

-- Dorothy Parker
books
here, read these two excerpts and then you'll save $23.99 by not having to bother buying Dragons of Summer Flame.

    Tasslehoff Burrfoot heaved a sigh. Plunking his small body down on a chair, he looked around, sighed again, and made an announcement.
    "I'm bored."
    Now, at the sound of these dreaded words, anyone who had lived long on Ansalon would have made every attempt to flee for his life. Go up to any seasoned warrior and ask him, "Pardon me, sir, but which would you rather be locked up in a room with - an army of ogres, a regiment of trolls, a brigade of draconians, a red dragon.. or a bored kender?"
    The warrior will pick the ogres, trolls, draconians *and* the red dragon hands down, every time. He will tell you, as will everyone you meet, that nothing on Krynn is more dangerous than a bored kender.
    Unfortunatelu, Usha, having never lived among kender, didn't know this...

    "That's more like it," said Tasslehoff, watching Palin and Usha. "They have each other now, and so, of course, everything will be all right. At least everything deserves to be all right for them. I've often found, though," he added with a sigh, "that deserving and happening don't necessarily go together."
    He stood watching the two, long enough to see them find solace and comfort in each other's arms. True love - if you're not in it, just happen to be standing there watching it - does tend to be a bit boring. Tas yawned, sneezed violently when some ash flew up his nose, and looked around for something to do.
    There, stretching before him among the stumps of burned trees, was a path.
    "All paths lead somewhere," is an old kender adage. Combine this with "Every path is the right path except when it's the left fork," and that pretty well sums up kender philosophy.

    Anathema Device - her mother, who was not a great student of religious matters, happened to read the word one day and thought it was a lovely name for a girl - was eight and a half years old, and she was reading The Book, under the bedclothes, with a torch.
    Other children learned to read on basic primers with colored pictures of apples, balls, cockroaches, and so forth. Not the Device family. Anathema had learned to read from The Book.
    It didn't have any apples and balls in it. It did have a rather good eighteenth-century woodcut of Agnes Nutter being burned at the stake and looking rather cheerful about it.
    The first word she could recognize was "nice". Very few people at the age of eight and a half know that nice also means "scrupulously exact", but Anathema was one of them.
    The second word was "accurate".
    The first sentence she had ever read out loud was:
    "I tell thee thif, and I charge ye with my wordes. Four shalle ryde, and Four shalle alfo ryde, and Three sharl ryde the Skye as twixt, and Wonne shal ryde in flames, and theyr shall be no stopping themme; not fish, not rayne, nor rode, neither Deville nor Angel. And ye shalle be theyr alfo, Anathema."
    Anathema liked to read about herself.
    (There were books which caring parents who read the right Sunday papers could purchase with their children's names printed in as the heroine or hero. This was meant to interest the child in the book. In Anathema's case, it wasn't only her in The Book - and it had been spot on so far - but her parents, and her grandparents, and everyone, back to the seventeenth century. She was too young and too self-centered at this point to attach any importance to the fact that there was no mention made of her children, or indeed, any events in her future further away than eleven years' time. When you're eight and a half, eleven years is a lifetime, and of course, if you believed The Book, it would be.)
    She was a bright child, with a pale face, and black eyes and hair. As a rule she tended to make people feel uncomfortable, a family trait she had inherited, along with being more psychic than was good for her, from her great-great-great-great-great grandmother.
    She was precocious, and self-possessed. The only thing about Anathema her teachers ever had the nerve to upbraid her for was her spelling, which was not so much appalling as 300 years too late.
-- from _Good Omens_, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
"He found his hands twining, almost of their own volition, into the star's wet hair. He wondered how it could have taken him so long to realize how much he cared for her, and he told her so, and she called him an idiot, and he declared that it was the finest thing that ever a man had been called."
-- Neil Gaiman, _Stardust_
    Picard, Riker, Worf and Data barreled down a corridor, following the trail of carnage. To their shock, Q came running from the other direction. He skidded to a half and shouted, "Warn her, Picard! Warn her that she cannot treat me in this manner! She's unleashing forces she doesn't understand!"
    "She hasn't listened to me since this whole business started," said Picard calmly. "What makes you think she'll listen now?"
    Suddenly Q vanished.
    They looked around, certain that he had dematerialized once more, and then abruptly they heard a high-pitched cry of alarm. They looked down.
    Q was six inches tall. He was running around on the floor, shaking his teeny fists in impotent fury.
    Lwaxana burst into existence above him. "Hello, *darling!*" she snarled, and brought her foot down.
    Q ran frantically, right and left, dodging the pounding feet. "Picard!" he howled in soprano. "Picard!"
    She suddenly reached down and grabbed him up. "Got you!" she snarled, and vanished.
    The Enterprise officers looked at each other.
    "She's really beating the stuffing out of him," observed Riker. "What do you think we should do?"
    "Sell tickets," rumbled Worf.
-- Peter David, _Q-in-Law_