quotes from the written word.
Christianity: the belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was
his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh
and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove
an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman
was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree... yeah, makes
perfect sense.
-Unknown
...an unprecedented array of truly decadent
adult sex toys designed to reawaken the mysteries of the cosmos even as they
terrify the godsmacked conservative right, a group that would have us all
wrap our sinful bodies in black sackcloth and pack our genitalia in concrete
lest we all quiver and implode and sing shameless love songs to the devil.
- Mark Morford,
SFGate.com
Note from Webmistress Rebecca: the following six quotes are from a fabulously written article in the SF Gate by Mark Morford... I included so many of them here because they were just so... fabulous :) - you can read the full article in the Rants section of this site. And read on, I promise there's quotes from more than just Mr. Morford after them.
There are these things. These unholy events
called "Purity Balls" and you should probably fall to your knees right this
minute and thank a merciful and lubricious and happily polyamorous God that you
do not know what they are and that you have access right this minute to vast
quantities of wine to deflect their nasty karmic arrows because, you know, oh my
God. But hey, free country.
- Mark Morford,
SFGate.com
...the daughter stands up, her pale arms wrapped around her daddy, and reads
aloud a formal pledge that she will remain forever pure and virginal and
sex-free until she is handed over, by her dad (who is actually called the "high
priest" of the home), like some sort of sad hymenic gift, to her husband,
who will receive her like the sanitized and overprotected and libidinously inept
servant she so very much is. Praise! Would that I were making this up.
- Mark Morford,
SFGate.com
Premarital sex is evil. Female sexuality must be, as ever, contained, repressed, shoved deep down lest it tempt men to sin like gleeful pagans licking ice cream from the pierced nipples of the devil.
- Mark Morford, SFGate.com
Shouldn't one's overall happiness -- physical, marital or otherwise -- be directly equated with exceptional amounts of sexual training and education and awareness? Is such positively libidinous education not a recipe for health and well-being and long-term marital satisfaction?
- Mark Morford, SFGate.com
Look, the plague of sexual incompetence plagues our land like
a plague. It infects our schools, our popular culture, our presidential
administration. The right endorses wanton sexual stupidity (and all
ensuing miseries, drug addictions, divorces, stresses, gun fetishes, online porn
obsessions) through failed abstinence programs, STD misinformation, refusal to
support quality birth control and the relentless repetition of lies about sin
and depravity and a shocking ignorance of the transformative spiritual power of
sex. Purity Balls? Nothing but a sad celebration of that exact ignorance.
- Mark Morford,
SFGate.com
There is no sacredness in the virgin. There is only the fear, were she to be educated and empowered and really let loose, of what she could become.
- Mark Morford, SFGate.com
It is one of the great superstitions of the human
mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.
-Voltaire
Elphaba, the adolescent Wicked Witch of the West-to-be describes her snooty and airheaded roommate, Galinda (the Good Witch Glinda-to-be) to a would-be suitor:
You know, Boq, the thing is I have become fond of Galinda myself. Behind her starry-eyed love of herself there is a mind struggling to work. She does think about things. When her mind is really working, she could, if led, think on you - even, I suspect, somewhat fondly. I suspect. I don't know. But when she slides back into herself, I mean into the girl who spends two hours a day curling that beautiful hair, it's as if the thinking Galinda goes into some internal closet and shuts the door. Or as if she's in hysterical retreat from things that are too big for her. I love her both ways, but I find it odd. I wouldn't mind leaving myself behind if I could, but I don't know the way out.
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, by Gregory Maguire
The one word above all that makes marriage successful is
"ours."
-Robert Quillon
Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all
without words?
-Marcel Marceau
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an
act but a habit.
-Aristotle
It's like solitary confinement
Every time I stay quiet
I should start to speak
But I stop and stay silent
And now I've made my own hard bed
Inside a prison of words unsaid.
-"P.O.W.", poetry of Alicia Keys
It's more addictive than a cigarette wrapped in bacon!!!
-XBox Magazine review of Burnout 3
Geology shows that fossils are of different ages. Paleontology shows a fossil sequence, the list of species representing changes through time. Taxonomy shows biological relationships among species. Evolution is the explanation that threads it all together. Creationism is the practice of squeezing one's eyes shut and wailing "DOES NOT!"
-Dr. Pepper
The Princess Saralinda was tall, with freesias in her dark hair, and she wore serenity brightly like the rainbow. It was not easy to tell her mouth from the rose, or her brow from the white lilac. Her voice was faraway music, and her eyes were candles burning on a tranquil night. She moved across the room like wind in violets, and her laughter sparkled on the air, which from her presence, gained a faint and undreamed fragrance.
-excerpted from James Thurber's The Thirteen Clocks, which was Rebecca's father's favorite fairy tale, and the inspiration for her middle name.
To fall in
love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human
loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making
to find a
comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the
person one
desires to be.
--Anna Louise Strong
Don't walk
before me,
I may not follow.
Don't walk behind me,
I may not lead.
Just walk beside me
And be my friend.
-Camus
What we do in dreams we also do when
we are awake: we invent and fabricate
the person with whom we associate - and
immediately forget we have done so.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Friendship is Love without his wings!
-Lord Byron
Whoso loves
Believes the impossible.
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
-T. S. Eliot
Love does not consist in gazing at each
other,
but in looking together in the same direction.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Familiar acts are beautiful through love.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
Whatever women do they must do
twice as well as men to be thought
half as good; luckily, that's not difficult.
-Charlotte Whitton
All women are misfits. We do not fit into
this world without amputations.
-Marge Piercy
The modern
computer is capable of answering, in a matter of seconds,
mathematical questions that would take millions of years for a
human being to answer (even longer if he stopped for lunch). How
does the computer do this? Simple. It makes everything up. It
knows full well you're not going to waste millions of years
checking up on it. So you should never use computers for anything
really important, such as balancing your personal checkbook. But
they're fine for academic use.
-Dave Barry
...God
moves in extremely mysterious, not to say, circuitous ways. God
does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game
of His own devising, which might be compared, from the
perspective of any of the other players (i.e., everybody), to
being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a
pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a
Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who SMILES ALL THE TIME.
-from "Good Omens", by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
Magnitudes
By Howard NemerovEarth's wrath at our assaults is slow to come
But relentless when it does. It has to do
With catastrophic change, and with the limit
At which one order more of magnitude
Will bring us to a qualitative change
And disasters drastically different
From those we daily have to know about
As with the speed of light, where speed itself
Becomes a limit and an absolute;
As with the splitting of the atom, and a little later of the nucleus;
As with the millions rising into billions-
The piker's kind in terms of money, yes,
But a million2 in terms of time and space
As the universe grew vast while the earth
Our habitat diminished to the size
Of a billiard ball, both relative
To the cosmos and to the numbers of ourselves
The doubling numbers, the earth could accommodate.
We stand now in the place and limit of time
Where hardest knowledge is turning into dream,
And nightmares still confined in sleeping dark
Seem on the point of bringing into day
The sweating panic that starts the sleeper up.
One or another nightmare may come true,
And what to do then? What in the world to do?
| Tout s'en va Tout passé L'eau coule Et le coeure oublié -Flaubert |
All is in motion All is at rest The Water Flows And the heart forgets |
I have
known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not
looking you in the face. Don't trust that conventional idea.
Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the
week if there's anything to be got by it.
-Charles Dickens
Ars longa, vita brevis
(Life is short, art is long)
-Geoffrey Chaucer
And so the
problem remained, lots of people were mean, and most of them were
miserable. Even the ones with digital watches.
-Douglas Adams
When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
-William Blake
Oh, you who
are trying to learn the marvel of Love through the copy book of
Reason, I'm very much afraid you will never really see the point.
-Hafiz of Shiraz
Thou hast not youth nor age but as it were an
after dinner sleep, dreaming of both.
-T.S. Eliot
Farewell
vain world, I've had enough of thee,
And now I am careless what thou say'st of me
Thy smiles I count not, nor thy frowns I fear
My cares are past, my heart lies easy here
What faults they find in me take care to shun
And look home: enough is to be done.
-John Upson, 1774
Either Heaven or Hell will have continuous
background music.
Which one you think it will be tells a lot about you.
-Bill Vaughan
To love someone is to see the face of God.
-Victor Hugo
If we had a keen vision of all that is
Ordinary in human life, it would be like
Hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's
Heart beat, and we should die of that roar
That is the other side of silence.
-George Eliot
I have said
that the soul is not more than the body
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self.
-Walt Whitman
While it is
critical to understand the scope and magnitude of the crisis
afflicting our nation's children, it is important not to become
overwhelmed and paralyzed, nor to lose sight of the very human
faces and lives represented by the numbers.
-Shannon Daly
He was my North, my South, my East, and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever; I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one:
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods
For nothing can ever come to any good.
-W.H. Auden
When I give, I give myself.
-Walt Whitman
If we could share this world below
If we could learn to love...
If we could share this world below
We'd need no world above.
-Ray Faraday Nelson
...But so my gaze follows you,
It is the eye that must follow beauty,
And so my soul will love you even now
As it is the heart must love what it knows
It just can't have...
-K.M.G. Keegan
To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
-William Blake
[on AIDS and the Family Values motif:] We
cannot praise the family
and then ignore the virus that destroys it.
-Mary Fisher
[The psychology field] is male-dominated.
While 90 percent of the students are women, almost all the
theorists and famous therapists are men.
-Mary Pipher, Ph.D.
Every day in the life of a woman is a walking
Miss America Contest.
-Wendy Bantam
...the best way to understand teenagers [is]
to think of them as constantly on LSD.
-Mary Pipher, Ph.D.
[For adolescents, in regards to relating to
their parents] Fights are a way of staying close and asserting
their distance at the same time.
-Mary Pipher, Ph.D.
Racial issues are difficult for Americans to
discuss. We have so few examples of good discussions about ethnic
differences that even to acknowledge differences makes most of us
feel guilty.
-Mary Pipher, Ph.D.
Life is like music, it must be composed by
ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule. Nevertheless one had
better know the rules, for they sometimes guide in doubtful
cases, though not often.
-Samuel Butler
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
-Margaret Mead [Founder of the International Planned Parenthood Federation]
Comfort the troubled, and trouble the
comfortable.
-Arthur Fleming
All people on the planet, regardless of their unique heritage or tradition, are searching for a larger purpose. We all seek to give special meaning to our lives...When all is said and done, to be truly educated means examining one's own values and beliefs.
-Ernest Boyer, Sr. 1928-1995, [former U.S. Commissioner of Education]Take my hands and part with laughter,
Touch our lips and part with tears
High I'll fly, and long I'll live
Tears I'll cry, and smiles I'll give,
And all I touch and all I see
Is all my life with you will ever be.
-Source unknown
The writings of Anka Radakovich
What makes our gatherings different from
boys' night out is that nothing is too personal to say.
And nobody drinks ten beers and throws up.
We [women] believe that man's best friend is actually his penis. Like a dog, it is always happy to see us, enjoys being petted, and often rubs itself against our legs.
There simply isn't enough time to navigate the maze of male behavior and try to make sense out of it. My brother advised me to save many hours of overanalyzing and simply head to the zoo to observe the gorillas.
Men should always remember that women never forget.
And that's why we can't shut up.
Females rarely get a good look at our genitalia,
because to do so, we need a mirror and a search light.
I'm the first to admit that what the gynecologist
sees all day looks like a slab of hairy roast beef.
Men see their bachelor pads as a sort of mini-Playboy Mansion. Women see them as Date-Rape Central. The goal of this type of dwelling is to put us in the mood, to get us turned on like crazed nymphos. Hence the décor combines all the ambience of a furniture showroom with the comfort of a car's backseat. Women do not find this romantic. We hate to be reminded of horny sixteen-year-old boys with hard-ons trying to pull us down onto a car's vinyl seating. This does not make a girl feel special.
To man, sperm is "nature's love juice." To women, this
substance is as appetizing as a glassful of runny boogers.
Men... are constantly reminded of their biological imperative. This might explain why every time I walk by my neighborhood plant store with a man he points to the enormous cacti in the window and says, 'There's my size.' Women, conversely, do not walk by a Dunkin' Donuts, eye the hole on a glazed, and make the same comparison.
...contrary to Freud's theory, we do not envy the penis. The reasons are obvious. First, we would not know how to sit comfortably with one; second, we do not want something veiny falling out of our shorts; and third, a penis looks terrible in a tight dress.
The writings of Susie Bright
When lovers have sex that doesn't result in pregnancy, it becomes radiantly apparent what OTHER lasting results come from sex: intimacy, self-enlightenment, a source of strength and tenderness and imagination that really can't be uncovered in any other way.
If limiting abortion were REALLY about children, then we would have a radically different world than the one we see around us today. If we really felt that children were the focal point of human life, it would not be enough to conceive them. Children would be greeted with the utmost concern and generosity by not only their blood family but by the whole community. The child's education and welfare would be the foundation of social institutions. Choosing to carry a child would be cherished, as much as birth control and abortion would be honored - if the point of giving life was to give a lifetime.
Abortion is nothing less than triage; it is preserving the right
to survive for those who have a decent chance of making it.
If men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
If we really wanted to change the face of abandonment and abuse, we'd give more respect and power to children than we do to fetuses.
Who would have thought marriage was, after all, about love? Certainly not the folks who argue so defiantly that gays and lesbians should not be allowed to legally marry. Marriage is about children, they spit, marriage is about sexual exclusivity - well, if that's what marriage licenses are for, then more than half the heterosexual ones should be revoked.
The right wing has no intention of creating an AIDS policy that doesn't put the blame on an "alternative lifestyle" for a disease that they repeatedly frame in moral terms: "What have you done to deserve this?"
[on the women's lib movement:] In a vulva-shaped nutshell, the message was: find your clit, learn to create your orgasm, express your sexual curiosity to it's fullest, and don't let anyone, especially any man, tell you how to get off.
[AIDS] has forced people to talk about the big no-no's, sex and death, whether they care to or not. Americans are more comfortable talking about sex if they have urgent, practical reasons - or a scholarly screen that turns them into social critics, instead of raincoaters with their sex in their hand.
Everybody, at every level, is in some kind of "gang" - it's just that the respectable gangs wear suits and work in skyscrapers and usually don't get their hands on Uzis: they have other effective weapons for protecting their property, accumulating power, or destroying lives.
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