No gentlemen, the difficult thing is not to escape death, I think, but to escape wickedness--that is much more difficult, for that runs faster than death.

Plato, Apology
 

Criton, we owe a cock to Asclepios; pay it without fail.

Plato, Phaedo
 

My point which upon this has been obscured
Is that it was the lions who procured
By chewing up blood gristle flesh and bone
The martyrdoms on which the Church has grown.
I only write this poem because I thought it rather looked
As if the part the lions played was being overlooked.

Stevie Smith, Sunt Leones
 

I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

Stevie Smith, Not Waving But Drowning
 

I've wrestled with reality for 35 years, doctor, and I'm happy to say I've finally won out over it.

"Elwood P. Dowd," from Harvey
 

62. The true treasure of the Church is the Most Holy Gospel of the glory and the grace of God.
63. But this treasure is naturally most odious, for it makes the first to be last.

Martin Luther, 95 Theses
 

I can understand a wrathful God who'd just as soon dangle us all from a hook.  And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus.  But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house.

Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
 

Others were fools in the morning
Or in the evening or on Saturdays
Or odd days like Friday the Thirteenth
But me -- I was a fool every day in the week
And when asleep I was the sleeping fool.
(So I dreamed.)

Carl Sandburg, Dreaming Fool
 

God is no gentleman for God
puts on overalls and gets
dirty running the universe we know
about and several other universes
nobody knows about but Him.

Carl Sandburg, God Is No Gentleman
 

Think of your many years of procrastination; how the gods have repeatedly granted you further periods of grace, of which you have taken no advantage.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
 

In the life of a man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his senses a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, and his fame doubtful.  In short, all that is of the body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapours; life a warfare, a brief sojourning in an alien land; and after repute, oblivion.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
 

He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.

Goethe
 

Suspect too much sweet talk
But never close your mind.

It was a fortunate wind
That blew me here.  I leave
Half-ready to believe
That a crippled trust might walk

And the half-true rhyme is love.

Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy
 

'Forgive the way I have lived indifferent--
forgive my timid circumspect involvement.'

Seamus Heaney, Station Island
 

'Read poems as prayers,' he said, 'and for your penance
translate me something by Juan de la Cruz.'

Seamus Heaney, Station Island
 

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
 

He knocks him down dead: the pagans rejoice.
The Franks say: 'Our men are failing fast.'

The Song of Roland
 

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces
 

Think of the storm roaming the sky uneasily
like a dog looking for a place to sleep in,
listen to it growling.

Elizabeth Bishop, Little Exercise
 

A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect.

Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth (the Humbug)
 

I know one thing for certain; it's much harder to tell whether you are lost than whether you were lost, for, on many occasions, where you're going is exactly where you are.  On the other hand, you often find that where you've been is not at all where you should have gone, and, since it's much more difficult to find your way back from someplace you've never left, I suggest you go there immediately and then decide.

Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
 

[Milo] asked the bird, "Are you a demon?"
"I'm afraid not," he replied sadly, as several filthy tears rolled down his beak.  "I've tried, but the best I can manage to be is a nuisance," and, before Milo could reply, he flapped his dingy wings and flew off in a cascade of dust and dirt and fuzz.

Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
 

One of the logical consequences of monotheism is guilt.

Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?
 

There was a listening fear in her regard,
As if calamity had but begun;
As if the vanward clouds of evil days
Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear
Was with its stored thunder labouring up.

John Keats, Hyperion
 

As from his watching place a goatherd watches a cloud move
on its way over the sea before the drive of the west wind;
far away though it be he watches it, blacker than pitch is,
moving across the sea and piling the storm before it,
and as he sees it he shivers and drives his flocks to a cavern;
so about the two Aiantes moved the battalions . . .

Homer, Iliad IV: 275-80
 

Who knows if Jove who counts our score
Will toss us in a morning more?

Horace IV.7, trans. Samuel Johnson

We were talking
about the love that's grown so cold
and the people
who gain the world and lose their soul
They don't know --
They can't see --
Are you one of them?

George Harrison, Within You Without You
 

As when her friend the crack Austrian skier, in the story
she often told us, had to face
his first Olympic ski jump and, from
the starting ramp over the chute that plunged
so vertiginously its bottom lip
disappeared from view, gazed
on a horizon of Alps that swam and dandled around him
like toy boats in a bathtub, and he could not
for all his iron determination,
training, and courage
ungrip his fingers from the railing of the starting gate, so that
his teammates had to join in prying
up, finger by finger, his hands
to free him, so

facing death, my
mother gripped the bed rails but still
stared straight ahead -- and
who was it, finally,
who loosened
her hands?

Rosanna Warren, Simile (published in The New Yorker, 10 Apr 2000, and used without permission - sorry!)
 

I never met the Devil (yet) but I imagine it's a pretty scary experience but then again I guess that's the point.

Brian Andreas
 

I threw out my hope chest a while back because it was too big to carry around with me all the time but I still kept all the blankets & clothes.  I just dress in more layers now & I'm hoping to move to a cooler climate soon.

Brian Andreas
 

I'm a good jumper, he said, but I'm not so good at landing.  Maybe you should stay closer to the ground then, I said & he shook his head & said the ground was the whole problem in the first place.

Brian Andreas
 

for a long time, she flew only when she thought no one else was watching

Brian Andreas
 

More like a vault: you pull the handle out
and on the shelves not a lot,
and what there is (a boiled potato
in a bag, a chicken carcass
under foil) looking dispirited,
drained, mugged.  This is not
a place to go in hope or hunger.
But, just to the right of the middle
of the middle door shelf, on fire, a lit-from-within red,
heart-red, sexual-red, wet neon-red,
shining red in their liquid, exotic,
aloof, slumming
in such company: a jar
of maraschino cherries.  Three-quarters
full, fiery globes, like strippers
at a church social.  Maraschino cherries, "maraschino"
the only foreign word I knew.  Not once
did I see these cherries employed: not
in a drink, nor on top
of a glob of ice cream,
or just pop one in your mouth.  Not once.
the same jar there through an entire
childhood of dull dinners -- bald meat,
pocked peas, and, see above,
boiled potatoes.  Maybe
they came over from the old country,
family heirlooms, or were status symbols
bought with a piece of the first paycheck
from a sweatshop,
which beat the pig farm in Bohemia,
handed down from my grandparents
to my parents
to be someday mine,
then my child's?
They were beautiful
and if I never ate one
it was because I knew it might be missed
or because I knew it would not be replaced
and because you do not eat
that which rips your heart with joy.

Thomas Lux, Refrigerator, 1957 (published in The New Yorker, 28 July 1997, and, again, used without permission)
 

When you are in the hands of God, your eyes turn green.

Tuuka Luukas
 

God is a metaphor.

Joseph Campbell
 
 
 

Back to that haven of familiarity which is called Main
Venturing on to that unexplored territory which are the Odd Sayings of My Personal Acquaintances