I just realized (or remembered, now I think about it) Kindle has a visual quotation feature. This one refers to Tahiti, “paradise” to the early sailors who landed there and found a different and less restrictive society, not so much after a few visits.
During the annual Black Friday shopping event, Americans spend money they don’t have on things they don’t need and that don’t make them happy or happier, just poorer and unsatisfied. Then, like Charlie Brown, they wonder what happened to the spirit of Christmas.
Diane Schirf
I passed some time in Poets Corner, which occupies an end of one of the transepts or cross aisles of the abbey. The monuments are generally simple; for the lives of literary men afford no striking themes for the sculptor. Shakespeare and Addison have statues erected to their memories; but the greater part have busts, medallions, and sometimes mere inscriptions. Notwithstanding the simplicity of these memorials, I have always observed that the visitors to the abbey remained longest about them. A kinder and fonder feeling takes place of that cold curiosity or vague admiration with which they gaze on the splendid monuments of the great and the heroic. They linger about these as about the tombs of friends and companions; for indeed there is something of companionship between the author and the reader. Other men are known to posterity only through the medium of history, which is continually growing faint and obscure: but the intercourse between the author and his fellow-men is ever new, active, and immediate. He has lived for them more than for himself; he has sacrificed surrounding enjoyments, and shut himself up from the delights of social life, that he might the more intimately commune with distant minds and distant ages. Well may the world cherish his renown; for it has been purchased, not by deeds of violence and blood, but by the diligent dispensation of pleasure. Well may posterity be grateful to his memory; for he has left it an inheritance, not of empty names and sounding actions, but whole treasures of wisdom, bright gems of thought, and golden veins of language.
Washington Irving, “Westminster Abbey”
She’s living in a place where you take the Obama sticker off your car.
Two women discussing a friend
Desk attendant at the Flamingo:
Every now and then I used to get a resident come down and ask for a [phone] book, but not anymore.
A young man passing by said to me, “Enjoy it while you can. Only two days left!” At first I thought he meant the pool, which may remain open as long as the weather holds out. Then I thought he meant summer, which, according to some calendars, ends with Labor Day. If he had excellent eyesight (better than mine, corrected), he may have been referring to Bristol Renaissance Faire, which is mentioned on my t shirt and which concludes tomorrow. I’m leaning toward the latter because of the oddness of the comment, shot at a stranger on the other side of a fence, and the way he was looking back at me when I glanced up, as though he were checking to see if I’d gotten the joke.
It does remind me that not everyone shares my view that summer is over only with the autumnal equinox.
When does your summer end?
From John Adams by David McCullough, in a passage about a possible Adams candidacy for US president:
When [Abigail] reminded [John] that he was sixty years old, he replied, “If I were near I would soon convince you that I am not above forty.”
College female 1: . . . a concept for class. That’s how Jamba Juice was created.
College female 2: Oh, wow.
This is a book that every single parent needs to read.
Book review
[That’s single as in every parent, not as in every unmarried parent.]
DUDE, WE WERE ON FIRE!
Chicago History Museum headline
My love for you is like a shiny heart-shaped metaphor about the sea.
Metra sign
Take it off vibrate. I don’t pay for that.
Women speaking into her mobile phone
We have swine flu masks! We have Hallmark cards for Mom!
Electronic sign at Walgreens
Some students purge or starve so they can binge drink.
RedEye
Offered by the Illinois Tollway at oases: The popular Captain Tollway coloring book
Willow! Montana!
Dad calling his children
Elderly couple at the bus stop discussing the man’s choice of gym shoes:
Woman: Is there any reason you made that weird decision?
Man: If it aggravates you, that’s reason enough.
Dedicated to the enlightenment of the human spirit
Window sign at Roosevelt University
NO PUBLIC RESTROOMS
If I major in econ. and work on Wall Street, I could be your sugar mama!
College student on mobile phone in elevator
From St. Mawr by D. H. Lawrence.
As far as people go, my heart is quite broken. As far as people go, I don’t want any more. I can’t stand any more. What heart I ever had for it — for life with people — is quite broken. I want to be alone, mother: with you here, and Phoenix perhaps to look after horses and drive a car. But I want to be by myself, really.
I’m convinced that ever since men and women were men and women, people who took things seriously, and had time for it, got their hearts broken. Haven’t I had mine broken? It’s as sure as having your virginity broken: and it amounts to about as much. It’s a beginning rather than an end.
I’ve got to live for something that matters, way down in me. And I think sex would matter to my very soul, if it was really sacred. But cheap sex kills me . . . I dislike [men] because they’re not men enough: babies, and playboys, and poor things showing off all the time, even to themselves. I don’t say I’m any better. I only wish, with all my soul, that some men were bigger and stronger and deeper than I am . . . No, mother, of this I am convinced: either my taking a man shall have a meaning and a mystery that penetrates my very soul, or I will keep to myself . . . And to [the spirit that is wild], my sex is deep and sacred, deeper than I am, with a deep nature aware deep down of my sex.
He understood that shivering better now. He was the conduit, the open window, by which, on rare occasions, she felt the ventus Dei. In the center of her sensuality, she was God’s plaything.
John Updike, “Love Song, for a Moog Synthesizer”