LaughAloud

In this life we have to play it as it lays

 

Woe to him who quarrels with his Maker,
to him who is but a potsherd among the potsherds on the ground.
Does the clay say to the potter, "What are you making?"
Does your work say, "He has no hands?"

Woe to him who says to his father,"What have you begotten?"
Or to his mother, "What have you brought to birth?"

                              - Isaiah 45:10

          As Quoted by Lester, October 18, 2005

 

And Know the Place for the First Time

"The horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle.  That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. . . . .Envision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, and not just wanting admission, but needing it; we don't know what it is, but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking.  That, finally, the door opens. . . and it opens outward --we've been standing inside what we wanted all along."

--David Foster Wallace

Lester Quotes Again

"I hate the idea of dying for a cause, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the courage to betray my country."

                                                                -- E.M. Forster

                                            (Quoted by Lester on June 9, 1999)

Lester Quotes

I haven't brought back this recurring feature for a while, and thought it was about time.

"I could have stayed up there for always only.  It's something fails us. First we feel. Then we fall. And let her rain now if she likes.  Gently or strongly as she likes. Anyway let her rain for my time is come. I done me best when I was let. Thinking always if I go all goes. A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of nights?"

                                           -- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

(Quoted by Lester on April 8, 1998 - only he didn't give a source, he made me search it out.  Thanks for honing my librarian skills.)

Lester Quotes

"Education can be a great shield against experience.  It offers so much ready made and all from the best shops that there is a temptation to miss your own life in pursuing the lives of your betters.  It makes you wise in some ways, but it can make you a blind-folded fool in others."

                             -- Robertson Davies

        (Quoted by Lester on December 19, 1997)

 

Lester Quotes

"All that jewelry weighs you down. Like vanity.  Can't nobody fly with all that shit.  Wanna fly, you gotta give up the shit that weighs you down."

                       --Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

                   (Quoted by Lester on October 8, 1997)

Lester Quotes

"I decline to accept the end of man.  It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that  of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.  I refuse to accept this.  I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail."

           -- William Faulkner, Nobel Prize acceptance speech

(Quoted by Lester on September 27, 1997 for the occasion of Faulkner's 100th birthday)

Lester Quotes 2

"Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist.  Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burdens and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from outside."

                                  -- Rainer Maria Rilke

                  (Quoted by Lester September 13, 1997)

First in a Series

People who know me, know I save things.  Lots of  things.  I have too many things.  Especially papers and little odds and ends saved from many years ago.  I attach meanings and memories to things and have trouble throwing them out. 

(Brief aside:  I have no trouble throwing out books at work.  Space is space, and when you have a duplicate or triplicate and no other depository library in country wants it, straight into the recycling bin it goes.  I do relish that thud.  My Collection Management Professor said she would like to have an assignment where students had to throw an old book away, so they could get over their horror, but she just can't bring herself to do it. Please.)

Anyway, my virtual world is much like my personal world.  Which is why, I happen to have every email correspondence Lester has written to me since we went away to college.  (Yes, even the ones he said I should destroy immediately.)  By correspondence, I mean the emails we would have written on paper and sent in the mail twenty years ago.  We both had this nice habit of  ending our emails with quotes and since I still have all those emails, this post is the first in a series of quotes from Lester.

"I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.  Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 A.M. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make ammends. . .We forget the loves and betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were."

                      --Joan Didion,   "On keeping a notebook"

                                   (Quoted September 9, 1997)