Lamp Post Quotes

He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts... for support rather than illumination.

This is the land of Narnia,' said the Faun, 'where we are now; all that lies between the lamp-post and the great castle of Cair Paravel on the eastern sea.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs." [Time Magazine, October 31, 1977]

Critics are to authors what dogs are to lamp-posts.

Sometimes you're the lamp post, and sometimes you're the dog.

One should use information and logic as a drunkard would use a lamp post, only for support, not for illumination.

He would make a good lamp post if he'd weather better and didn't have to eat.

White Sky. Trees fading at the skyline, the mountains gone. My hands dangled from the cuffs of my jacket as if they weren’t my own. I never got used to the way the horizon there could just erase itself and leave you marooned, adrift, in an incomplete dreamscape that was like a sketch for the world you knew -the outline of a single tree standing in for a grove, lamp-posts and chimneys floating up out of context before the surrounding canvas was filled in-an amnesia-land, a kind of skewed Heaven where the old landmarks were recognizable but spaced too far apart, and disarranged, and made terrible by the emptiness around them.

Her Lips Are Copper Wire” whisper of yellow globes gleaming on lamp posts that sway like bootleg licker drinkers in the fog and let your breath be moist against me like bright beads on yellow globes telephone the power-house that the main wires are insulate (her words play up and down dewy corridors of billboards) then with your tongue remove the tape and press your lips to mine till they are incandescent

There was only this one lamp-post. Behind was the great scoop of darkness, as if all the night were there.

Rena?” I looked up as a figure emerged from the white void of snowfall. The snow dusted his broad shoulders as he took long, measured strides toward me, his black coat flapping in the wind. As he neared, I made out his startled features. “Wallace?” His gaze burned with indiscernible emotion. “Are you hugging the lamp post?

If you take from a theory only the conclusions you like and discard the rest, you are using the theory as a drunkard uses a lamp post for support rather than illumination.

... I chanced upon these words from a letter by Van Gogh: "Like everyone else, I feel the need of family and friendship, affection and friendly intercourse. I am not made of iron, like a hydrant or a lamp post. Perhaps this is what really counts: to arrive at the core of human feeling, in spite of the evidence.

[Aunt Dahlia to Bertie Wooster] 'To look at you, one would think you were just an ordinary sort of amiable idiot--certifiable, perhaps, but quite harmless. Yet, in reality, you are worse a scourge than the Black Death. I tell you, Bertie, when I contemplate you I seem to come up against all the underlying sorrow and horror of life with such a thud that I feel as if I had walked into a lamp post. I thought as much. Well, it needed but this. I don't see how things could possibly be worse than they are, but no doubt you will succeed in making them so. Your genius and insight will find the way. Carry on, Bertie. Yes, carry on. I am past caring now. I shall even find a faint interest in seeing into what darker and profounder abysses of hell you can plunge this home. Go to it, lad..I remember years ago, when you were in your cradle, being left alone with you one day and you nearly swallowed your rubber comforter and started turning purple. And I, ass that I was, took it out and saved your life. Let me tell you, young Bertie, it will go very hard with you if you ever swallow a rubber comforter again when only I am by to aid.

We're in a world where everything, even a lamp-post, comes to life and grows. Now I wonder what kind of a seed a lamp-post grows from....

Black(people) hold onto their God just as the drunken man holds on to the street lamp post—for physical support only.

They are coming to rely too much on research, and they use it as a drunkard uses a lamp post, for support rather than for illumination.

One should use information and logic as a drunkard would use a lamp post – only for support, not for illumination.

Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, "Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good--" At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.

Loneliness, on the other hand, has no age bracket. I used to think that exciting countries could keep you happy and warm on novelty alone. Now I know: you can move to Paris, delight in the city, drink your cafe au lait, but no matter how pretty the buildings and balconies are, eventually you're going to find yourself hugging the lamp posts for company like you're in Les Miserables.

what this country needs is a DICTATOR. i feel the time is right, and the place congenial. i will be STRICT but JUST. heads will roll, and CORPSES will swing from EVERY LAMP POST...evil that succeeds is GOOD. the coup is well in preparation.

It was a perfect little model of a lamp-post, about three feet high but lengthening, and thickening in proportion, as they watched it; in fact growing just as the trees had grown.

Some preachers use the Bible the way a drunk uses a lamp post . . . more for support than for illumination.

My wife says I'd get philosophical with a lamp post if I thought the thing had ears.

This is the land of Narnia,' said the Faun, 'where we are now; all that lies between the lamp-post and the great castle of Cair Paravel....

I'm equally sure, however, that I won't walk into a lamp-post while reading {literature}, like I did with {a legal thriller} all those years ago; you don't walk into lamp-posts when you're reading literary novels, do you?

The relationship between the critic and writer is similar to the one between the pigeon and the statue or the dog and lamp post.

Most people use statistics the way a drunkard uses a lamp post, more for support than illumination.

Look," she sighed. "You might be a lovely lad, in fairness you look like a lovely lad, but I can't take the chance. My kids wouldn't even be able to remember what I was wearing to tell the police. And all the recent photographs of me are bad, very jowly. I couldn't have them stuck to the lamp posts around the city. On your way, son." (Woman to Matt, when he tried to give her a lift.)

Four men may meet under the same lamp post; one to paint it pea green as part of a great municipal reform; one to read his breviary in the light of it; one to embrace it with accidental ardour in a fit of alcoholic enthusiasm; and the last merely because the pea green post is a conspicuous point of rendezvous with his young lady. But to expect this to happen night after night is unwise….

And here is the sense of its existence: it is conscious of being superfluous. It dilutes, scatters itself, tries to lose itself on the brown wall, along the lamp post or down there in the evening mist. But it never forgets itself. That is its lot.

I was waiting for you," said Gregory. "Might I have a moment's conversation?" "Certainly. About what?" asked Syme in a sort of weak wonder. Gregory struck out with his stick at the lamp-post, and then at the tree. "About this and this," he cried; "about order and anarchy. There is your precious order, that lean, iron lamp, ugly and barren; and there is anarchy, rich, living, reproducing itself--there is anarchy, splendid in green and gold." "All the same," replied Syme patiently, "just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.

Lasher smiled sadly. "The great American indvidual," he said. "Thinks he's the embodiment of liberal thought throughout the ages. Stands on his own two feet, by God, alone and motionless. He'd make a good lamp post, if he'd weather better and didn't have to eat.

Travel had seemed the key to the kingdom, back then. One dreamed of a life that would enable travel. Howard looked through his window at a lamp-post buried to its waist in show supporting two chained-up, frozen bikes, identifiable only by the tips of their handlebars. He imagined waking up this morning and digging his bike out of the snow and riding to a proper job, the kind Belseys had had for generations, and found he couldn't imagine it. This interested Howard, for a moment: the idea that he could no longer gauge the luxuries of his own life.

permanently cobwebbed lamp posts, Nocturne Falls made no bones about what happened here. I was a little in love already. There were even old-school Halloween characters walking around taking pictures with people. I passed a witch before I’d been on the street for ten minutes.

If we were in his book, our hands would leave trails of light like sparklers through the sky, glowing against the night; they would crackle and fizz with magic. But we aren't, so they're just mildly clammy and soundtracked by someone throwing up against a lamp post on the promenade (loudly).

But, Cass, ask yourself, look out and ask yourself – wouldn’t you hate all white people if they kept you in prison here?’ They were rolling up startling Seventh Avenue. The entire population seemed to be in the streets, draped, almost, from lamp-posts, stoops, and hydrants, and walking through the traffic as though it were not there. ‘Kept you here, and stunted you and starved you, and made you watch your mother and father and sister and lover and brother and son and daughter die or go mad or go under, before your very eyes? And not in a hurry, like from one day to the next, but, every day, every day, for years, for generations? Shit. They keep you here because you’re black, while they go around jerking themselves off with all the jazz about the land of the free and the home of the brave. And they want you to jerk yourself off with the same music, too, only keep your distance. Some days, honey, I wish I could turn myself into one big fist and grind this miserable country to powder. Some days, I don’t believe it has a right to exist. Now, you’ve never felt like that, and Vivaldo’s never felt like that. Vivaldo didn’t want to know my brother was dying because he doesn’t want to know that my brother would still be alive if he hadn’t been born black.

Happiness is a strange thing; even when it's a deep happiness and makes you see everything in a soft glowy light. It's like this cloak that you wear so you only see the good parts on top of the soil. But then you can't forget that the soil is where the roots are. You can be happy for so long looking at all the roses, that you start to miss what it felt like to be curled amongst their roots, entwined within the warmth of the damp dirt, roots wrapped around your limbs. You can begin to forget that depth. You can begin to forget who you are. Maybe happiness isn't any better; maybe it's just something we do to make the days brighter. Like a lamp post. But lamp posts drown out the stars, you see.

There is a great danger in the tendency to suppose that opposition to authority is essentially meritorious and that unconventional opinions are bound to be correct: no useful purpose is served by smashing lamp-posts or maintaining Shakespeare to be no poet. Yet this excessive rebelliousness is often the effect that too much authority has on spirited pupils.

The door to Jackson’s opens and a man staggers out. He crab-walks away from them, along the pavement until he hits a lamp post. He clings to it, waiting until his legs agree to listen to orders. Confident he has reached an entente cordiale with his knees, he straightens up, watching his rebel legs to see if the truce holds. It does, but only for standing. The moment he attempts a step he is swept around the corner like a trawlerman thrown from a deck in a storm.

Curious?” This second man was tall as a lamp post. His pale face, lunar pockmarks denting it, cast light on those who stood below. His vest was the color of fresh blood. His eyebrows, his hair, his suit were licorice black, and the sun-yellow gem which stared from the tie pin thrust in his cravat was the same unblinking shade and bright crystal as his eyes. But in this instant, swiftly, and with utter clearness, it was the suit which fascinated Will. For it seemed woven of boar-bramble, clock-spring hair, bristle, and a sort of ever-trembling, ever-glistening dark hemp. The suit caught light and stirred like a bed of black tweed-thorns, interminably itching, covering the man’s long body with motion so it seemed he should excruciate, cry out, and tear the clothes free. Yet here he stood, moon-calm, inhabiting his itch-weed suit and watching Jim’s mouth with his yellow eyes. He never looked once at Will. “The name is Dark.

Don’t you see?” said Digory. “This is where the bar fell—the bar she tore off the lamp-post at home. It sank into the ground and now it’s coming up as a young lamp-post.” (But not so very young now; it was as tall as Digory while he said this.)

Men lived among mighty mountains and eternal forests for ages before they realized that they were poetical; it may reasonably be inferred that some of our descendants may see the chimney-pots as rich a purple as the mountain-peaks, and find the lamp-posts as old and natural as the trees.

He led me out of that tangle of alleys in another direction, it seems, for when we sighted a lamp-post we were in a half-familiar street with monotonous rows of mingled tenement blocks and old houses. Charter Street, it turned out to be, but I was too flustered to notice just where we hit

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry, -- determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business. Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.

We don’t want to think about being a witness to our husband’s stabbing. Or supporting our wife through her rapist’s trial. Or receiving the phone call reporting that our straight-A son’s exam celebrations got a bit lairy and ended in him taking his mate’s dad’s Jag out for a spin, wrapping it round a lamp post and killing his three passengers. Or our grandfather being accused of sexually abusing young boys as a Scout leader in the 1950s. Such things don’t happen to people like us. The criminal courts are not the place for people like us. Legal aid isn’t something that is ever going to affect people like us.

much.” “With all her faults,” said Uncle Andrew, “that’s a plucky gel, my boy. It was a spirited thing to do.” He rubbed his hands and cracked his knuckles, as if he were once more forgetting how the Witch frightened him whenever she was really there. “It was a wicked thing to do,” said Polly. “What harm had he done her?” “Hullo! What’s that?” said Digory. He had darted forward to examine something only a few yards away. “I say, Polly,” he called back. “Do come and look.” Uncle Andrew came with her; not because he wanted to see but because he wanted to keep close to the children – there might be a chance of stealing their rings. But when he saw what Digory was looking at, even he began to take an interest. It was a perfect little model of a lamp-post, about three feet high but lengthening, and thickening in proportion, as they watched it; in fact growing just as the trees had grown. “It’s alive too – I mean, it’s lit,” said

I never got used to the way the horizon there could just erase itself and leave you marooned, adrift, in an incomplete dreamscape that was like a sketch for the world you knew—the outline of a single tree standing in for a grove, lamp-posts and chimneys floating up out of context before the surrounding canvas was filled in—an amnesia-land, a kind of skewed Heaven.

I'd just put Ed Hickey into a taxi. Ed had been mixing his rye with his gin, and I just felt that he needed conveying. Well, anyway, I was walking down along the street and I heard this voice saying, "Good evening, Mr. Dowd." Well, I turned around and here was this big six-foot rabbit leaning up against a lamp-post. Well, I thought nothing of that because when you've lived in a town as long as I've lived in this one, you get used to the fact that everybody knows your name. And naturally I went over to chat with him. And he said to me... he said, "Ed Hickey was a little spiffed this evening, or could I be mistaken?" Well, of course, he was not mistaken. I think the world and all of Ed, but he was spiffed. Well, we talked like that for awhile and then I said to him, I said, "You have the advantage on me. You know my name and I don't know yours." And, and right back at me he said, "What name do you like?" Well, I didn't even have to think twice about that. Harvey's always been my favorite name. So I said to him, I said, "Harvey." And, uh, this is the interesting thing about the whole thing: He said, "What a coincidence. My name happens to be Harvey.

Gregory struck out with his stick at the lamp-post, and then at the tree. "About this and this," he cried; "about order and anarchy. There is your precious order, that lean, iron lamp, ugly and barren; and there is anarchy, rich, living, reproducing itself—there is anarchy, splendid in green and gold." "All the same," replied Syme patiently, "just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.

I never got used to the way the horizon there could just erase itself and leave you marooned, adrift, in an incomplete dreamscape that was like a sketch for the world you knew—the outline of a single tree standing in for a grove, lamp-posts and chimneys floating up out of context before the surrounding canvas was filled in—an amnesia-land, a kind of skewed Heaven where the old landmarks were recognizable but spaced too far apart, and disarranged, and made terrible by the emptiness

I never got used to the way the horizon there could just erase itself and leave you marooned, adrift, in an incomplete dreamscape that was like a sketch for the world you knew—the outline of a single tree standing in for a grove, lamp-posts and chimneys floating up out of context before the surrounding canvas was filled in—an amnesia-land, a kind of skewed Heaven where the old landmarks were recognizable but spaced too far apart, and disarranged, and made terrible by the emptiness around them.

I mean,' he said with increasing vehemence, `that if there be a house for me in heaven it will either have a green lamp-post and a hedge, or something quite as positive and personal as a green lamp-post and a hedge. I mean that God bade me love one spot and serve it, and do all things however wild in praise of it, so that this one spot might be a witness against all the infinities and the sophistries, that Paradise is somewhere and not anywhere, is something and not anything. And I would not be so very much surprised if the house in heaven had a real green lamp-post after all.

A good writer is likely to know and use, or find out and use, the words for common architectural features, like "lintel," "newel post," "corbelling," "abutment," and the concrete or stone "hems" alongisde the steps leading up into churches or public buildings; the names of carpenters' or pumbers' tools, artists' materials, or whatever furniture, implements, or processes his characters work with; and the names of common household items, including those we do not usually hear named, often as we use them. Above all, the writer should stretch his vocabulary of ordinary words and idioms--words and idioms he sees all the time and knows how to use but never uses. I mean here not language that smells of the lamp but relatively common verbs, nouns, and adjectives. The serious-mined way to vocabulary is to read through a dictionary, making lists of all the common words one happens never to use. And of course the really serious-minded way is to study languages--learn Greek, Latin, and one or two modern languages. Among writers of the first rank one can name very few who were not or are not fluent in at least two. Tolstoy, who spoke Russian, French, and English easily, and other languages and dialects with more difficulty, studied Greek in his forties.

White sky. Trees fading at the skyline, the mountains gone. My hands dangled from the cuffs of my jacket as if they weren’t my own. I never got used to the way the horizon there could just erase itself and leave you marooned, adrift, in an incomplete dreamscape that was like a sketch for the world you knew—the outline of a single tree standing in for a grove, lamp-posts and chimneys floating up out of context before the surrounding canvas was filled in—an amnesia-land, a kind of skewed Heaven where the old landmarks were recognizable but spaced too far apart, and disarranged, and made terrible by the emptiness around them.

But trivial as are the topics they are not utterly without a connecting thread of motive. As the reader's eye strays, with hearty relief, from these pages, it probably alights on something, a bed-post or a lamp-post, a window blind or a wall. It is a thousand to one that the reader is looking at something that he has never seen: that is, never realised. He could not write an essay on such a post or wall: he does not know what the post or wall mean. He could not even write the synopsis of an essay; as "The Bed-Post; Its Significance—Security Essential to Idea of Sleep—Night Felt as Infinite—Need of Monumental Architecture," and so on. He could not sketch in outline his theoretic attitude towards window-blinds, even in the form of a summary. "The Window-Blind—Its Analogy to the Curtain and Veil—Is Modesty Natural?—Worship of and Avoidance of the Sun, etc., etc." None of us think enough of these things on which the eye rests. But don't let us let the eye rest. Why should the eye be so lazy? Let us exercise the eye until it learns to see startling facts that run across the landscape as plain as a painted fence. Let us be ocular athletes. Let us learn to write essays on a stray cat or a coloured cloud. I have attempted some such thing in what follows; but anyone else may do it better, if anyone else will only try.

Steerforth, laughing, took me by the arm and led me out. We went downstairs, one behind another. Near the bottom, somebody fell, and rolled down. Somebody else said it was Copperfield. I was angry at that false report, until, finding myself on my back in the passage, I began to think there might be some foundation for it. A very foggy night, with great rings round the lamps in the streets! There was an indistinct talk of its being wet. I considered it frosty. Steerforth dusted me under a lamp-post, and put my hat into shape, which somebody produced from somewhere in a most extraordinary manner, for I hadn't had it on before. Steerforth then said, 'You are all right, Copperfield, are you not?' and I told him, 'Neverberrer.

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time.

Often I gazed at you in wonder. I stood at the window begun yesterday, stood and marvelled at you. Yet the new city was denied me and the unpersuaded landscape darkened, as though I were nothing. Nor did things close by venture to be understood. The street thrust upwards at the lamp post: I could see it was an alien thing. Over there a room, sympathetic, clear in the lamplight – I was already a part; this they sensed, closed the shutters. Remained there. Then a child cried. I knew the mothers in the houses around, of what they are capable – and I knew at once the inconsolable argument behind all weeping. Or a voice sang out and reached a little beyond expectation, or down below an old man who coughed full of reproach, as if his body were in the right and the gentler world in error. Then the hour struck, but I counted too late, it fell past me. Like a boy, a stranger, at last deemed worthy to join in yet drops the ball and knows none of the games in which the others indulge with such ease, stands there, looks away – to where?: I stood and suddenly became aware, you approached me, played with me, I understood, grown-up night, and I gazed at you enraptured. Where the towers raged and, with fate averted, a city loomed over me and before me were ranged unknowable mountains and in the narrowing circle of hungering strangeness welled the random flickering of my feelings there it was, higher one, no shame for you, that you know me. Your breath passed over me, across widening solemn expanses your smile entered into me.

Now when I say “I,” it seems hollow to me. I can’t manage to feel myself very well, I am so forgotten. The only real thing left in me is existence which feels it exists. I yawn, lengthily. No one. Antoine Roquentin exists for on one. That amuses me. And just what is Antoine Roquentin? An abstraction. A pale reflection of myself wavers in my consciousness. Antoine Roquentin . . . and suddenly the “I” pales, pales, and fades out. Lucid, forlorn, consciousness is walled-up; it perpetuates itself. Nobody lives there any more. A little while ago someone said “me,” said my consciousness. Who? Outside there were streets, alive with known smells and colours. Now nothing is left but anonymous walls, anonymous consciousness. That is what there is: walls, and between the walls, a small transparency, alive and impersonal. Consciousness exists as a tree, as a blade of grass. It slumbers, it grows bored. Small fugitive presences populate it like birds in the branches. Populate it and disappear. Consciousness forgotten, forsaken between these walls, under this grey sky. And here is the sense of its existence: it is conscious of being superfluous. It dilutes, scatters itself, tries to lose itself on the brown wall, along the lamp post or down there in the evening mist. But it never forgets itself. That is its lot. There is a stifled voice which tells it: “The train leaves in two hours,” and there is the consciousness of this voice. There is also consciousness of a face. It passes slowly, full of blood, spattered, and its bulging eyes weep. It is not between the walls, it is nowhere. It vanishes; a bent body with a bleeding face replaces it, walks slowly away, seems to stop at each step, never stops. There is a consciousness of this body walking slowly in a dark street. It walks but it gets no further away. The dark street does not end, it loses itself in nothingness. It is not between the walls, it is nowhere. And there is consciousness of a stifled voice which says: “The Self-Taught Man is wandering through the city.” Not the same city, not between these toneless walls, the Self-Taught Man walks in a city where he is not forgotten.

Doctor Parcival shook with fright. "I have a presentiment," he declared emphatically. "It may be that what I am talking about will not occur this morning. It may be put off until tonight but I will be hanged. Everyone will get excited. I will be hanged to a lamp-post on Main Street." Going to the door of his dirty office, Doctor Parcival looked timidly down the stairway leading to the street. When he returned the fright that had been in his eyes was beginning to be replaced by doubt. Coming on tiptoe across the room he tapped George Willard on the shoulder. "If not now, sometime," he whispered, shaking his head. "In the end I will be crucified, uselessly crucified." Doctor Parcival began to plead with George Willard. "You must pay attention to me," he urged. "If something happens perhaps you will be able to write the book that I may never get written. The idea is very simple, so simple that if you are not careful you will forget it. It is this—that everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified. That's what I want to say. Don't you forget that. Whatever happens, don't you dare let yourself forget.

...the letters begin to cross vast spaces in slow sailing ships and everything becomes still more protracted and verbose, and there seems no end to the space and the leisure of those early nineteenth century days, and faiths are lost and the life of Hedley Vicars revives them; aunts catch cold but recover; cousins marry; there is the Irish famine and the Indian Mutiny, and both sisters remain, to their great, but silent grief, for in those days there were things that women hid like pearls in their breasts, without children to come after them. Louisa, dumped down in Ireland with Lord Waterford at the hunt all day, was often very lonely; but she stuck to her post, visited the poor, spoke words of comfort (‘I am sorry indeed to hear of Anthony Thompson's loss of mind, or rather of memory; if, however, he can understand sufficiently to trust solely in our Saviour, he has enough’) and sketched and sketched. Thousands of notebooks were filled with pen and ink drawings of an evening, and then the carpenter stretched sheets for her and she designed frescoes for schoolrooms, had live sheep into her bedroom, draped gamekeepers in blankets, painted Holy Families in abundance, until the great Watts exclaimed that here was Titian's peer and Raphael's master! At that Lady Waterford laughed (she had a generous, benignant sense of humour); and said that she was nothing but a sketcher; had scarcely had a lesson in her life—witness her angel's wings, scandalously unfinished. Moreover, there was her father's house for ever falling into the sea; she must shore it up; must entertain her friends; must fill her days with all sorts of charities, till her Lord came home from hunting, and then, at midnight often, she would sketch him with his knightly face half hidden in a bowl of soup, sitting with her notebook under a lamp beside him. Off he would ride again, stately as a crusader, to hunt the fox, and she would wave to him and think, each time, what if this should be the last? And so it was one morning. His horse stumbled. He was killed. She knew it before they told her, and never could Sir John Leslie forget, when he ran down-stairs the day they buried him, the beauty of the great lady standing by the window to see the hearse depart, nor, when he came back again, how the curtain, heavy, Mid-Victorian, plush perhaps, was all crushed together where she had grasped it in her agony.

My father played the melodion Outside at our gate; There were stars in the morning east; And they danced to his music. Across the wild bogs his melodion called To Lennons and Callans. As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry I knew some strange thing had happened. Outside in the cow-house my mother Made the music of milking; The light of her stable-lamp was a star And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle. A water-hen screeched in the bog, Mass-going feet Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes, Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel. My child poet picked out the letters On the grey stone, In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland, The winking glitter of a frosty dawn. Cassiopeia was over Cassidy's hanging hill, I looked and three whin bushes rode across The horizon - the Three Wise Kings. An old man passing said: "Can't he make it talk" - The melodion, I hid in the doorway And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat. I nicked six nicks on the door-post With my penknife's big blade - There was a little one for cutting tobacco. And I was six Christmases of age. My father played the melodion, My mother milked the cows, And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned On the Virgin Mary's blouse

Arm in arm with a fellow who's had the mishap, To forget, when he shagged her, to button his flap. Nor I don't like to see, though some think it a treat. A young woman scratching her thing in the street; And a boarding-school miss, with no sense in her pate. Sit and chalk a man's tool on the back of her slate. I don't like to see, in the bright face of the day, A man stand and piss in the public highway; Nor a Newfoundland dog, without any disguise. Tied fast to a bitch not a quarter his size. Nor I don't like to see, little sisters and brothers Get playing at what they call fathers and mothers; And I don't like to see, though at me you might scoff, An old woman trying to toss herself off. I don't like to see - it's a fact that I utter - That nasty word — written up on a shutter: And I don't like to see a man, drunk as an Earl. Getting into a lamp-post thinking it's a girl. I don't like to see, 'cause my feelings it shocks. Two girls busy playing with each other's c-; Nor I don't like to see, though it may be a whim. A hole like a pit-mouth in place of a q-. But I fear I'm encroaching too much on your time, So I'll put an end to my quizzical rhyme; Though with my way of taste you'll perhaps not agree, I've told you the things I don't like to see.

Six Significant Landscapes" I An old man sits In the shadow of a pine tree In China. He sees larkspur, Blue and white, At the edge of the shadow, Move in the wind. His beard moves in the wind. The pine tree moves in the wind. Thus water flows Over weeds. II The night is of the colour Of a woman's arm: Night, the female, Obscure, Fragrant and supple, Conceals herself. A pool shines, Like a bracelet Shaken in a dance. III I measure myself Against a tall tree. I find that I am much taller, For I reach right up to the sun, With my eye; And I reach to the shore of the sea With my ear. Nevertheless, I dislike The way ants crawl In and out of my shadow. IV When my dream was near the moon, The white folds of its gown Filled with yellow light. The soles of its feet Grew red. Its hair filled With certain blue crystallizations From stars, Not far off. V Not all the knives of the lamp-posts, Nor the chisels of the long streets, Nor the mallets of the domes And high towers, Can carve What one star can carve, Shining through the grape-leaves. VI Rationalists, wearing square hats, Think, in square rooms, Looking at the floor, Looking at the ceiling. They confine themselves To right-angled triangles. If they tried rhomboids, Cones, waving lines, ellipses -- As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon -- Rationalists would wear sombreros.

One should use information and logic as a drunkard would use a lamp post, only for support, not for illumination.

So I drink just one more glass to get me through the night; I look at my lamp, my fan, all the pictures and posted on my wall and I know I have failed again. I have left things left unsaid, undone, unseen. With only my dreams to guide me. If I knew my greatest sins were behind me, and not only something I felt, I would feel safe alone in my flawed arms, hoping to touch something purer and lovelier than me, so I think of you. I know what hopes are left to you, I know what pressure they bring and I still feel them because if anything hopes are wasteless. They are the infinite until we become the finite. I know I should not be scared of them, I know that they could be false, but dreams themselves are only false when the individual is false. I am false. I am hope. I am all the things I wish I could be but never see. So I see you, beautiful, long black hair, I say: God let this all be for something. And you sit there with your brown questioning eyes, you smile and I think again: God let this all be for something.

Politicians use economics in the same way that a drunk uses lamp-posts—for support rather than illumination. —variation on a theme of Andrew Lang (1910)

At last I came upon the hedge maze. Far from the warm circles of light cast by torch and lamp, the leaves and twigs here were wedged in a silver lacework of starlight and shadow. The entrance was framed by two large trees, their branches still bare of any new growth. In the darkness, they seemed less like garden posts marking the way into the labyrinth than two silent sentinels guarding the doorway to the underworld. Shapes writhed in the shadows beyond the archway of bramble and vine, both inviting and intimidating. Yet I was not frightened. The hedge maze smelled like the forest outside the inn, a deep green scent of growth and decay, where life and death were intermingled. A familiar scent. A welcoming scent. The scent of home. Removing my mask, I crossed the threshold, letting darkness swallow me whole. There were no torches or candles lit upon the paths, and neither moonlight nor starlight penetrated the dense bramble. Yet my footing along these paths was sure, every part of me attuned to the wildness around me. Unlike the maze of Schönbrunn Palace, a meticulously manicured and man-made construction, this labyrinth breathed. Nature creeped in along the edges, reclaiming groomed, orderly, and civilized corridors into a twisting tangle of tunnels and tracks, weeds and wildflowers. Paths grew vague, roots unruly, branches untamed. Somewhere deep in the labyrinth, I could hear the giggles and gasps of illicit encounters in the shrubbery. I was careful of my step, lest I trip over a pair of trysting lovers, but when I came upon no one else, I let myself fall into a meditative state of mind. I wandered the recursive spirals of the hedge maze, turn after turn after turn, feeling a measure of calm for the first time in a long time.

Such was life; everything passed away; the fields and woodlands of boyhood became built upon; streets and pavements and lamp posts arose where warblers and willow wrens had sung; nothing ever remained the same.

In the highest sense, indeed, all thought is reflection. "This is the real truth, in the saying that second thoughts are best. Animals have no second thoughts; man alone is able to see his own thought double, as a drunkard sees a lamp-post; man alone is able to see his own thought upside down as one sees a house in a puddle. This duplication of mentality, as in a mirror, is (we repeat) the inmost thing of human philosophy. There is a mystical, even a monstrous truth, in the statement that two heads are better than one. But they ought both to grow on the same body." Chesterton, Gilbert K.. Manalive

At length, one evening towards the end of March, the mental clearness of Orange somewhat revived, and he felt himself compelled to get up and put on his clothes. The nurse, thinking that the patient was resting quietly, and fearing the shine of the lamp might distress him, had turned it low and gone away for a little: so it was without interruption, although reeling from giddiness, and scorched with fever, that Rupert groped about till he found some garments, and his evening suit. Clad in these, and throwing a cloak over his shoulders, he went downstairs. Those whom he met, that recognized him, looked at him wonderingly and with a vague dread; but he appeared to have his understanding as well as they, and so he passed through the hall without being stopped; and going into the bar, he called for brandy. The bar-tender, to whom he was known, exclaimed in astonishment; but he got no reply from Orange, who, pouring himself out a large quantity of the fiery liquor found it colder than the coldest iced water in his burning frame. When he had taken the brandy, he went into the street. It was a bleak seasonable night, and a bitter frost-rain was falling: but Orange went through it, as if the bitter weather was a not unwelcome coolness, although he shuddered in an ague-fit. As he stood on the corner of Twenty-third Street, his cloak thrown open, the sleet sowing down on his shirt, and the slush which covered his ankles soaking through his thin shoes, a member of his club came by and spoke to him. "Why, good God! Orange, you don't mean to say you're out on a night like this! You must be much better--eh?" he broke off, for Orange had given him a grey look, with eyes in which there was no speculation; and the man hurried away scared and rather aghast. "These poet chaps are always queer fishes," he muttered uneasily, as he turned into the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Of the events of terror and horror which happened on that awful night, when a human soul was paying the price of an astonishing violation of the order of the universe, no man shall ever tell. Blurred, hideous, and enormous visions of dives, of hells where the worst scum of the town consorted, of a man who spat on him, of a woman who struck him across the face with her umbrella, calling him the foulest of names--visions such as these, and more hateful than these, presented themselves to Orange, when he found himself, at three o'clock in the morning, standing under a lamp-post in that strange district of New York called "The Village." ("The Bargain Of Rupert Orange")

He stared at me for a couple of seconds, then picked up his cutlery, hunched over his plate. Outside, behind him, the wind carried the rain, the lamp posts quivered. I found myself thinking of certain people I knew--people not that far away--how surprised they'd be (wouldn't they?) to see me sitting there with that bright, bland expression on my face, trying to fence with this nonsense. Or had I been very naive? Was this what life was like, really, and everyone knew it but me?

Turn him loose, and the American White Man can and has whipped anything in sight. Sooner or later, the Jews will finally cross the borderline of American patience as they have done all throughout their history. When they do, the reaction of the American White Man will make the Jews get on their knees and pray for Adolf Hitler to save them. The revenge taken upon them by other outraged host people will seem like heaven compared to the ferocity of the White American, once he has had all he is going to take from these arrogant Jews. It is my hope to be organized and ready to channel this damned-up flood of righteous American rebellion against Jew tyranny, once it breaks loose, into CONSTRUCTIVE, rather than purely destructive directions. If I am successful, we can find a just solution to the Jewish problem. If I am unsuccessful, there will be Jews swinging from every lamp post in America.

Turn him loose, and the American White Man can and has whipped anything in sight. Sooner or later, the Jews will finally cross the borderline of American patience as they have done all throughout their history. When they do, the reaction of the American White Man will make the Jews get on their knees and pray for Adolf Hitler to save them. The revenge taken upon them by other outraged host people will seem like heaven compared to the ferocity of the White American, once he has had all he is going to take from these arrogant Jews. It is my hope to be organized and ready to channel this damned-up flood of righteous American rebellion against Jew tyranny, once it breaks loose, into CONSTRUCTIVE, rather than purely destructive directions. If I am successful, we can find a just solution to the Jewish problem. If I am unsuccessful, there will be Jews swinging from every lamp post in America.

Leto stood in the foyer of his house, studying a note by the light of a single suspensor lamp. Dawn was yet a few hours away, and he felt his tiredness. A Fremen messenger had brought the note to the outer guard just now as the Duke arrived from his command post

Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, "Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good—" At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.

I am a signal flare for explorers of the outer worlds, and a lamp post on a convoluted forest path. I believe this is what makes me shine in a nice way. Some people are threatened by it, but that is ok.

To the child the tree and the lamp-post are as natural and as artificial as each other; or rather, neither of them are natural but both supernatural. For both are splendid and unexplained.

I want to live. I want to walk for a spell without having some great fucking wall stopping me taking another step. I just want to be free. I want to see the stars without seeing bars. I want to be caught in a busy shopping crowd. I want to see children playing nonsense games. I want to see a dog pissing against a lamp post. I want to take my girlfriend for a walk. I want to sleep a whole night beside her. I want to see all of you suffer less. I want away from institutions.

Often I gazed at you in wonder. I stood at the window begun yesterday, stood and marvelled at you. Yet the new city was denied me and the unpersuaded landscape darkened, as though I were nothing. Nor did things close by venture to be understood. The street thrust upwards at the lamp post: I could see it was an alien thing. Over there a room, sympathetic, clear in the lamplight – I was already a part; this they sensed, closed the shutters. Remained there. Then a child cried. I knew the mothers in the houses around, of what they are capable – and I knew at once the inconsolable argument behind all weeping. Or a voice sang out and reached a little beyond expectation, or down below an old man who coughed full of reproach, as if his body were in the right and the gentler world in error. Then the hour struck, but I counted too late, it fell past me. Like a boy, a stranger, at last deemed worthy to join in yet drops the ball and knows none of the games in which the others indulge with such ease, stands there, looks away – to where?: I stood and suddenly became aware, you approached me, played with me, I understood, grown-up night, and I gazed at you enraptured. Where the towers raged and, with fate averted, a city loomed over me and before me were ranged unknowable mountains and in the narrowing circle of hungering strangeness welled the random flickering of my feelings – : there it was, higher one, no shame for you, that you know me. Your breath passed over me, across widening solemn expanses your smile entered into me.

Some would have been grateful for hot flushes, had that been one of their symptoms. Anyway, the rage is raw and uncontrollable, and women have told me absolutely mad stories about hurling hoovers out of windows, punching holes in walls and driving cars into lamp posts.

You went about with your soul full of suspicion and hatred; you understood that you were environed by hostile powers that were trying to get your money, and who used all the virtues to bait their traps with. The storekeepers plastered up their windows with all sorts of lies to entice you; the very fences by the wayside, the lamp-posts and telegraph-poles, were pasted over with lies. The great corporation which employed you lied to you, and lied to the whole country—from top to bottom it was nothing but one gigantic lie.

Chucking heartily after walking into a lamp post, despite a strong suspicion that you've broken your cheek.

Want 2 (Feat. Porsches)" Don't wanna take it slow I could be your fantasy You gotta let me know You gotta let me know Don't wanna take it slow I could be your ecstasy But I gotta let you know Gotta let you know I'm running like a white horse I'm running like a tiger, yeah I'm walking on a tight boat I'm??? like a lighthouse I'm hot like a fire I'll bite you like a spider, yeah I'm smoking like a white ghost I'm shining like a lamp post, yeah I can give you everything that I want to That I want to Coming on strong girl we can get it done If you want to, if you want to Don't wanna take it slow I could be your fantasy You gotta let me know You gotta let me know Don't wanna take it slow I could be your ecstasy But I gotta let you know Gotta let you know I'm running like a white horse I'm running like a tiger, yeah I'm walking on a tight boat I'm??? like a lighthouse I'm hot like a fire I'll bite you like a spider, yeah I'm smoking like a white ghost I'm shining like a lamp post, yeah I can give you everything that I want to That I want to Coming on strong girl we can get it done If you want to, if you want to I keep you coming, I keep you coming I keep you coming, I keep you coming I keep you coming, I keep you coming I keep you coming, I keep you coming I can give you everything that I want to That I want to Coming on strong girl we can get it done If you want to, if you want to

He continued to move forward, skirting a pocket of radiation that had not died in the four years since last he had come this way. They came upon a place where the sands were fused into a glassy sea, and he slowed as he began its passage, peering ahead after the craters and chasms it contained. Three more rockfalls assailed him before the heavens split themselves open and revealed a bright-blue light, edged with violet. The dark curtains rolled back toward the Poles, and the roaring and the gunfire reports diminished. A lavender glow remained in the north, and a green sun dipped toward the horizon at his back. They had ridden it out, and he killed the infras, pushed back his goggles, and switched on the normal night lamps. The desert would be bad enough, all by itself. Something big and batlike swooped through the tunnel of his lights and was gone. He ignored its passage. Five minutes later it made a second pass, this time much closer, and he fired a magnesium flare. A black shape, perhaps forty feet across, was illuminated, and he gave it two five-second bursts from the fifty-calibers, and it fell to the ground and did not return again. To the squares, this was Damnation Alley. To Hell Tanner, this was still the parking lot.

I have known a drunken man whip a post till he was tired, which he took for a human being that would not move out of his way. An old gentleman of 80, when in his cups, became so amorous, as to take a lamp-post for a lady, and addressed it with all the language of passion and flattery.

and Rachel has found one of the dancing poles near the stage. I rather wish she hadn’t, as any minute now I’m likely to get a really good look at her vagina. To her, I’m sure she looks like a professional stripper, sexually arousing every man in the night club with her suggestive, energetic dance moves. To me (and anyone else not drinking) she looks like a mental patient trying to fuck a lamp post.

At midnight when the fire had burnt down, and leaving the door wide open that she might have the lights behind her, she went through the dark hall, drew back the bolts of the front door and took her letters to the post. The village green outside was white with moonlight. As she stepped on to it it seemed a deck, her village ship a-sail on the slant of the world. The unknown and impersonal companion within her turned with a gulp, emitted a bubble of wind and revolved in its pond. "Do you never sleep?" she enquired aloud of her belly. The hemispheres whirled above the stillness, stars shone; down at human level the lamp in the churchyard gate was still as a star.

Most men's minds are so constituted that they have to think by means of examples ; if you do not supply these, they will supply them for themselves, and if you leave it wholly to them, they will do it badly. On the other hand, if you start from familiar things, they are very quick to make the necessary generalizations. In a sense they are making such generalizations constantly; whenever they recognize the thing before them as a chair or a lamp-post, they are leaping from the particular to the general by a process of implicit classification.

A true champ is never a star aloof in the heavens for atop lamp-posts they have made a home to warm, to brighten, the paths we walk

Nonetheless, it seems decidedly odd that the "Designer" also appears as you and me and the guy leaning on the lamp-post in the account of Quantum Mechanics written by Eddington nearly 60 years ago, and Eddington did not follow Wheeler's path of non-local correlations and backward-in-time causality. Eddington merely followed the Copenhagen Interpretation back into its origins in pragmatism and existentialism, as I have, and arrived at the conclusion which he expressed thus (Philosophy of Physical Science, page 148): We have found a strange foot-print on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And, lo! It is our own.

Anything else? Little lamps maybe? I could make adorable little fire-pokers if they have chimneys. Perhaps a post box?" Cat was giggling now, rocking back and forth on the log."We can't have the wee animals' mail getting lost.

The quiver of her pussy around me is all it takes to send me falling after her. Falling for her. There is no fucking doubt in my mind, it’s as clear as the lamp light signaling a goal, or the post-coital bliss glowing off the girl beneath me. I’m in love.

I think that no man who lives a merely negative religious life can ever know real spiritual joy. There are many people who pride themselves on the things they do not do. The negative Christian always suggests a lamp-post to me. The negative Christian says he is going to heaven because he does not lie. Neither does the lamp-post. The negative Christian does not steal. Neither does the lamp-post steal. He does not cheat, he does nothing of which he is ashamed: he is therefore blameless. The lamp-post has never done any one of these things. I do not want the Tuskegee students to be lamp-posts in their religious life, but I want them to turn their beliefs into energy that shall work into every detail of their lives.

Jalvert begins to whimper and clings on to Kate. In the car, Kuan Yin's slender figure is on the dashboard, her face serene, eyes down. Kate's eyes are on the expressway, Jalvert crying in the seat next to her. The orange lamp posts light their faces in intervals.

My dream is to race on that bridge. It's a long, straight road with only a slight curve at the start and at the end. Only the orange lamp posts are your guide, the dark sea on either side. That bridge is an easy race, but it takes a lot to stay awake on that thirteen-kilometre stretch. If you fall into the sea, you'd be going to sleep in a dark abyss. If you crash into the bridge dividers, you'd be shredded by a thousand metal shards.

Mrs. Post had lain quietly down and switched off the bedside lamp. Her head was like a magic lantern into which slides were thrust noisily, one after the other.

He was the biggest fool pup I ever saw, chuck full of life and spirits, always going at racing speed, generally into mischief; breaking his neck nearly over some small matter; breaking his heart if his master did not notice him, chewing up clothing, hats, and boots, digging up garden stuff that he could not eat, mistaking every leg of every chair and table for a lamp-post, going direct from wallow in the pigstye to frolic in the baby’s cradle, getting kicked in the ribs by horses and tossed by cows, but still the same hilarious, rollicking, endlessly good-natured, energetic fool pup, and given by common consent the fit and lasting name of “Silly Billy.

On the long drive home I would gaze up at the bare branches silhouetted against the deep purple sky. I saw twisted roots, the moonlit glen with leafy shadows and flickering lamp posts which were beacons and portals to the Fairy Realm. This secret, hallowed land was just out of reach, but real, nevertheless.