Plumbing Quotes

Without pain, how could we know joy?' This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.

He knows that you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.

Men are easy,' he said, fingers tapping on his mahogany desk. 'A man's plumbing is like his mind: simple, very few surprises. You ladies, on the other hand...well, God put a lot of thought into making you.

You know what I hate? The outdoors. I mean, generally. I don't like outside. I'm an inside person. I'm all about refrigeration and indoor plumbing and Judge Judy.

I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect.

Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy. He knows there's a painful side; he knows my thumb smarts and his girlfriend has a bruised breast and the doctor is losing his glasses, but he won't let the pain blot out the humor no more'n he'll let the humor blot out the pain.

I didn't understand how. But the toilets had responded to me. I had become one with the plumbing...

Unseen University had never admitted women, muttering something about problems with the plumbing, but the real reason was an unspoken dread that if women were allowed to mess around with magic they would probably be embarrassingly good at it…

ʺWhere is it?ʺ I asked. ʺLexington, Kentucky.ʺ ʺOh for Godʹs sake,ʺ I moaned. ʺWhy not the Bahamas? Or the Corn Palace?ʺ Dimitri tried to hide a smile. It might have been at my expense, but if Iʹd lightened his mood, I was grateful. ʺIf we leave right now, we can reach him before morning.ʺ I glanced around. ʺTough choice. Leave all this for electricity and plumbing?ʺ Now Sydney grinned. ʺAnd no more marriage proposals.ʺ ʺAnd weʹll probably have to fight Strigoi,ʺ added Dimitri. I jumped to my feet. ʺHow soon can we go?ʺ

Q: What’s hard for you? A: Mostly I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane. Math is hard. Reading a map. Following orders. Carpentry. Electronics. Plumbing. Remembering things correctly. Straight lines. Sheet rock. Finding a safety pin. Patience with others. Ordering in Chinese. Stereo instructions in German.

You are confusing plumbing and love again.

I have a head for heights it's true, but no stomach for the depths. Strange then to have plumbed so many.

His love for my mother wasn't about looking back and loving something that would never change. It was about loving my mother for everything -- for her brokenness and her fleeing, for her being there right then in that moment before the sun rose and the hospital staff came in. It was about touching that hair with the side of his fingertip, and knowing yet plumbing fearlessly the depths of her ocean eyes.

Don't be more serious than God. God invented dog farts. God designed your body's plumbing system. God designed an ostrich. If He didn't do it, He permitted a drunken angel to do it. Empirical facts can add significantly to the meaning of "being godlike".

I know what you're thinking," Grandma said into the silence. "Do I have anymore bullets in this here gun? Well, with all the confusion, what with being locked up in a refrigerator, I plumb forgot what was in here to start with. But being that this is a 45 magnum, the most powerful handgun in existence, and it could blow your head clean off, you just got to ask yourself one question. Do you feel lucky today? Well, do you, punk?" Christ," Spiro whispered. "She thinks she's f**king Clint Eastwood.

Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.

I suppose now I'm obliged to wish you happiness in your new life. Although happiness in the absence of indoor plumbing is a debatable concept.

The most experienced psychologist or observer of human nature knows infinitely less of the human heart than the simplest Christian who lives beneath the Cross of Jesus. The greatest psychological insight, ability, and experience cannot grasp this one thing: what sin is. Worldly wisdom knows what distress and weakness and failure are, but it does not know the godlessness of man. And so it also does not know that man is destroyed only by his sin and can be healed only by forgiveness. Only the Christian knows this. In the presence of a psychiatrist I can only be a sick man; in the presence of a Christian brother I can dare to be a sinner. The psychiatrist must first search my heart and yet he never plumbs its ultimate depth. The Christian brother knows when I come to him: here is a sinner like myself, a godless man who wants to confess and yearns for God’s forgiveness. The psychiatrist views me as if there were no God. The brother views me as I am before the judging and merciful God in the Cross of Jesus Christ.

I'd made water shoot out of the bathroom fixtures. I didn't understand how. But the toilets responded to me. I had become one with the plumbing.

A man's plumbing is like his mind: simple, very few surprises. You ladies, on the other hand...well, God put a lot of thought in making you.

The little poets sing of little things: Hope, cheer, and faith, small queens and puppet kings; Lovers who kissed and then were made as one, And modest flowers waving in the sun. The mighty poets write in blood and tears And agony that, flame-like, bites and sears. They reach their mad blind hands into the night, To plumb abysses dead to human sight; To drag from gulfs where lunacy lies curled, Mad, monstrous nightmare shapes to blast the world. MUSINGS [click on the thumbnail by Jack "King" Kirby]

Then the Old Man of the Earth stooped over the floor of the cave, raised a huge stone from it, and left it leaning. It disclosed a great hole that went plumb-down. "That is the way," he said. "But there are no stairs." "You must throw yourself in. There is no other way.

...you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy

I want my inner truth to be the plumb line for the choices I make about my life - about the work that I do and how I do it, about the relationships I enter into and how I conduct them.

To cease to wonder is to fall plumb-down from the childlike to the commonplace—the most undivine of all moods intellectual. Our nature can never be at home among things that are not wonderful to us.

Tinereţea noastră amară şi dulce... Ca o nucă verde cu coajă şi miez. Tinereţea noastră cu aripi şi cu plumb...

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words “compelle intrare,” compel them to come in, have been so abused be wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.

Downstairs in the lounge, by the third pillar from the left, there sits an old lady with a sweet, placid, spinsterish face and a mind that has plumbed the depths of human iniquity and taken it all as in the day's work....where crime is concerned, she's the goods.

Pretending any historical age before proper indoor plumbing was a glorious epoch is a ludicrous delusion.

An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams, Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical, I and this mystery here we stand.

Wanderer, who are you? I watch you go on your way, without scorn, without love, with impenetrable eyes - damp and downhearted, like a plumb line that returns unsatisfied from every depth back into the light (what was it looking for down there?), with a breast that does not sigh, with lips that hide their disgust, with a hand that only grips slowly: who are you? What have you done? Take a rest here, this spot is hospitable to everyone, - relax! And whoever you may be: what would you like now? What do you find relaxing? Just name it: I'll give you whatever I have! - "Relaxing? Relaxing? How inquisitive you are! What are you saying! But please, give me - -" What? What? Just say it! - "Another mask! A second mask!" ...

Josie produced a glass of water, through practiced manipulation of cupboards and valves and municipal plumbing. Neither she nor Jackie was impressed with the human miracle represented by how easily the glass of water was produced.

Now remember, when things look bad and it looks like you're not gonna make it, then you gotta get mean. I mean plumb, mad-dog mean. 'Cause if you lose your head and you give up then you neither live nor win. That's just the way it is.

Leo ran down the hall waving a wrench. “Man, did you have to destroy the plumbing?

I guess I had been looking toward the Encouragement above the TV, a drawing of an angel with the caption Without Pain, How Could We Know Joy? (This is an old argument in the field of Thinking About Suffering, and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries, but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not in any way affect the taste of chocolate.)

... he trotted down the hallway on all fours and started in on his second favorite pastime, conversations with plumbing. Just what I needed: Stone, the Toilet Whisperer.

Like plumbing, medicine is a profession where you learn early on not to put your fingers in your mouth.

I'd say the depths of his stupidity have yet to be plumbed, and yours is comin' up fast on the inside turn.

He knows that you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy

who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words compelle intrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of man, and His compulsion is our liberation.

I had become one with the plumbing.

Don’t need no more of this world’s goods. Some folks gits plumb mesmerized when paper money is shook afore their eyes.

As I got older, I also found myself agreeing more with Nietzsche, as is no doubt inevitable once your plumbing starts to fail.

Now you might remember the professor on the television show Gilligan’s Island. A really smart guy. He powered the island, developed a coconut clock, installed a plumbing and water system. He just never got around to fixing the boat. Brian was effective in just the same way.

To the Technocrats: Have mercy on us. Relax a bit, take time out for simple pleasures. For example, the luxuries of electricity, indoor plumbing, central heating, instant electronic communication and such, have taught me to relearn and enjoy the basic human satisfactions of dipping water from a cold clear mountain stream; of building a wood fire in a cast-iron stove; of using long winter nights for making music, making things, making love; of writing long letters, in longhand with a fountain pen, to the few people on this earth I truly care about.

I realized everybody at the table was holding their breath. Maybe they were afraid I would make all the plumbing in the apartment building explode. Which, for the record, I only did that one time.

The capacity of humans to believe in what seems to me highly improbable- from table tapping to the superiority of their children- has never been plumbed.

Anything that's strange is no good to the average American. If it doesn't have Chicago plumbing, it's nonsense.

she’s half a bubble out of plumb.

Life at the Shadowunter Academy was lacking in a lot of things Simon once belived he couldn't live without: computers, music, comic books, indoor plumbing. Over the past couple of months, he'd gotten mostly used to doing without, but there was one glaring absence he still couldn't wrap his head around. Shadowhunter Academy had no nerds.

Because they're probably long gone. Are you hurt?" Gabe asked with enough urgency that she realized he must have felt shiver in delayed reaction to the hole in the door. "No. No, I'm okay. What a about you? Are you hurt?" "Only if you count the fact that you damned near ripped off my plumbing groping around for my phone." She made a sound of exasperation. "Now? You pick now to become a comedian?" "It's all about timing," he whispered back.

At some point, a wave of repressed emotion broke through my armor, demanding expression and release. As I plumbed the depths of my despair, I shed one layer of pain after another. My inner world was like a series of reservoirs, each holding a different wave of emotional memory behind them. When one reservoir burst, another soon appeared. This phase went on for many months—the first of many essential release phases.

I was never very good with either my hands or feet. It always seemed to me they'd just been stuck on as an afterthought during my making. Dreams didn't translate through sports, or music, dancing, carpentry, plumbing. I was the bookish kid, more at home in the pages of a fantasy than in the room in the town on the planet.

The same God who loves us as we are also loves us to much to leave us as we are. Perhpas because we tend to hold to ideas about God that reflect our own suppositions and fears, more than God's self-revelation. We reduce God to our own dimensions, ascribing to him our own reactions and responses, especially our own petty and conditional kind of love, and so end up believing in a God cast in our own image and likeness. But the true God, the living God, is entirely "other":. Precisely from this radical otherness derives the inscrutable and transcendent nature of divine love-- for which our limited human love is but a distant metaphor. God's love is much more than our human love simply multiplied and expanded. God's love for us will ever be mystery; unfathomable, awesome, entirely beyond human expectation. Precisely because God's love is something "no eyes has seen, nor ear heard nor the heart of man conceived" (1 Cor 2:9), Mother Teresa meditated on it continuously, and encouraged us to do the same, to continue plumbing this mystery more deeply. To this end she invites us: "Try to deepen your understanding of these two words, 'Thirst of God.;

He's a good old sort. If only he weren't plumb crazy!

Every time I think my family has plumbed the depths of stupidity, somebody goes and finds a goddamn shovel.” —Jane Harrington-Price

String theory is rather like plumbing, in a way.

Poem (the spirit likes to dress up) The spirit likes to dress up like this: ten fingers, ten toes, shoulders, and all the rest at night in the black branches, in the morning in the blue branches of the world. It could float, of course, but would rather plumb rough matter. Airy and shapeless thing, it needs the metaphor of the body, lime and appetite, the oceanic fluids; it needs the body’s world, instinct and imagination and the dark hug of time, sweetness and tangibility, to be understood, to be more than pure light that burns where no one is – so it enters us – in the morning shines from brute comfort like a stitch of lightning; and at night lights up the deep and wondrous drownings of the body like a star.

And what is the state but a servant and a convenience for a large number of people, just like the electric light and the plumbing system? And wouldn't it be preposterous to claim that men must exist for their plumbing, not the plumbing for the men?

But while Sasha told us that in America even the most successful men can have but one wife at once--my father had six--and talked about escalators, indoor plumbing, and the various laws of the land, he did not warn us that I would be told by American teenagers that I should go back to Africa.

While McMurphy laughs. Rocking farther and farther backward against the cabin top,spreading his laugh across the water. Laughing at the girl,at the guys, at George,at me sucking my bleeding thumb, at the captain back at the pier and the bicycle rider and the service station guys and the five thousand houses and the Big Nurse and all of it. Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy. He know's there's a painful side; he knows my thumb smarts and his girl friend has a bruised breast and the doctor is losing his glasses, but he won't let the pain blot out the humor no more'n he'll let the humor blot out the pain.

The great paradox of the brain is that everything you know about the world is provided to you by an organ that has itself never seen that world. The brain exists in silence and darkness, like a dungeoned prisoner. It has no pain receptors, literally no feelings. It has never felt warm sunshine or a soft breeze. To your brain, the world is just a stream of electrical pulses, like taps of Morse code. And out of this bare and neutral information it creates for you—quite literally creates—a vibrant, three-dimensional, sensually engaging universe. Your brain is you. Everything else is just plumbing and scaffolding.

Music is a holy place, a cathedral so majestic that we can sense the magnificence of the universe, and also a hovel so simple and private that none of us can plumb its deepest secrets.

So he found her. Most people would have said she was relaxed. But then, Roarke thought, most people didn’t really know and certainly didn’t understand Eve Dallas. He was more intimate with her, closer to her mind and heart than he had ever been with another. Yet there were still pockets of her he had yet to plumb. She was, always, a fascinating learning experience. She was naked, dipped to her chin in steamy water and perfumed bubbles. Her face was flushed from the heat, her eyes closed, but she wasn’t relaxed. He could see the tension in the hand that was fisted on the wide ledge of the tub, in the faint frown between her eyes. No, Eve was thinking, he mused.

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression "as pretty as an airport". Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (...) and the architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs. They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve jangling colours, to make effortless the business of separating the traveller from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveller with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of the Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not".

I often said that writers are of two types. There is the architect, which is one type. The architect, as if designing a building, lays out the entire novel at a time. He knows how many rooms there will be or what a roof will be made of or how high it will be, or where the plumbing will run and where the electrical outlets will be in its room. All that before he drives the first nail. Everything is there in the blueprint. And then there's the gardener who digs the hole in the ground, puts in the seed and waters it with his blood and sees what comes up. The gardener knows certain things. He's not completely ignorant. He knows whether he planted an oak tree, or corn, or a cauliflower. He has some idea of the shape but a lot of it depends on the wind and the weather and how much blood he gives it and so forth. No one is purely an architect or a gardener in terms of a writer, but many writers tend to one side or the other. I'm very much more a gardener.

His rapier was at his belt, glittering as he swung. He reached down, ripped the sword clear. I jumped over a slashing frond of plasm, spun round with the water bottle in my hand. I hurled it across to Lockwood. George threw his rapier to me. Watch this now. Sword and bottle, sailing through the air, twin trajectories, arching beautifully through the mass of swirling tendrils towards Lockwood and me. Lockwood held out his hand. I held out mine. Remember I said there was that moment of sweet precision when we gelled perfectly as a team? Yeah, well. This wasn't it. The rapier shot past, missing me by miles. It skidded halfway across the floor. The bottle struck Lockwood plumb in the centre of his forehead, knocking him through the window. There was a moment's pause. 'Is he dead?' the skulls voice said 'Yay! Oh. No, he's hanging onto the shutters. Shame. Still, this is defiantly the funniest thing I've ever seen. You three really are incompetence on a stick

The capacity of a human mind to believe devoutly in what seems to me to be the highly improbable - from table tapping to the superiority of their own children - has never been plumbed. Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness, but I don't argue with it --- especially as I am rarely in a position to prove that it is mistaken. Negative proof is usually impossible.

Landlords took the side streets, typically not in their Saab or Audi but in their “rent collector,” some oil-leaking, rusted-out van or truck that hauled around extension cords, ladders, maybe a loaded pistol, plumbing snakes, toolboxes, a can of Mace, nail guns, and other necessities.

Today most poverty-stricken Americans have a television, telephone, electricity, running water, and indoor plumbing. Most Africans do not. If you transferred the goods and services enjoyed by those who live in California’s version of poverty to the average Somalian living on less than a $1.25 a day, that Somalian is suddenly fabulously rich.

No, I'm not Byron, it's my role To be an undiscovered wonder, Like him, a persecuted wand'rer, But furnished with a Russian soul. I started sooner, sooner ending, My mind will never reach so high; Within my soul, beyond the mending, My shattered aspirations lie: Dark ocean answer me, can any Plumb all your depth with skillful trawl? Who will explain me to the many? I... perhaps God? No one at all?

A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to show off their useless eduction, which consisted of the study of hocus-pocus from ancient times. They were bum poets as well. But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crime. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492 The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them. Here was another piece of nonsense which children were taught: that the sea pirates eventually created a government which became a beacon of freedom of human beings everywhere else. There were pictures and statues of this supposed imaginary beacon for children to see. It was sort of ice-cream cone on fire. It looked like this: [image] Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines. The sea pirates were white. The people who were already on the continent when the pirates arrived were copper-colored. When slavery was introduced onto the continent, the slaves were black. Color was everything. Here is how the pirates were able to take whatever they wanted from anybody else: they had the best boats in the world, and they were meaner than anybody else, and they had gunpowder, which is a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulphur. They touched the seemingly listless powder with fire, and it turned violently into gas. This gas blew projectiles out of metal tubes at terrific velocities. The projectiles cut through meat and bone very easily; so the pirates could wreck the wiring or the bellows or the plumbing of a stubborn human being, even when he was far, far away. The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were.

I look ridiculous and stupid. As I check myself in the bathroom mirror, I want to back out. I'm wearing a skintight leotard/body suit obviously designed by women who have no clue about men's plumbing, because the outline of my dick is obscene. Don't dudes who do this ridiculous sport wear a cup or something? I've been on a trampoline, but I've never done synchronized trampolining. Looking at myself in the mirror, I can see why.

Or, I could just sit in the bushes and pump the hand pump until the plumbing was superpressurized to 110 psi. This way, when someone goes to flush a toilet, the toilet tank will explode. At 150 psi, if someone turns on the shower, the water pressure will blow off the shower head, strip the threads, blam, the shower head turns into a mortar shell. Tyler only says this to make me feel better. The truth is I like my boss. Besides, I'm enlightened now. You know, only Buddha-style behavior.

listening to music renews the heart precisely for this reason: it plumbs the gravity of sorrow until it finds the point of submerged light and lightness. Listening to music stirs the heavy heart; it alters the gravity. Unconsciously it schools us in a different way to hold sorrow. When the music is dark it works through dissonance and harsh notes; like underpainting their beauty is slow to reveal itself but it does ultimately dawn. It frees a space to let in lightness. Unlike anything else in the world, music is neither image nor word and yet it can say and show more than a painting or poem.

Madeleine in her turn stared at him steadily, straight into his eyes, in a profound, strange way, as if seeking to read something there, as if seeking to discover there that hidden part of a human being which can never be fathomed but may perhaps be glimpsed for a fleeting instant, in those moments of unguardedness or surrender or inattention, that are like doors left ajar onto the mysterious depths of the spirit... they stood for a few seconds, each gazing into the other's eyes, each striving to reach the impenetrable secret of the other's heart, to probe each other's thoughts to the quick. They tried, in a mute and passionate questioning, to see the other's conscience in its essential truth: the intimate struggles of two beings who, living side by side, never really know one another, who suspect and sniff around and spy on one another, but cannot plumb the miry depths of one another's soul.

I ’ve often felt separate from other human beings. I have my moments of togetherness with others; I love all sentient beings with my heart and am wildly fortunate to have friends I can talk to, share joy and despair with; we loyally have each other’s back. I wordlessly communicate with other musicians, sometimes plumbing great depths. But I’m awkward with other people, sometimes even my closest friends. My mind wanders, seeing others hold hands in a circle, from my separate place. My earliest memories are rooted in an underlying sense that something’s wrong with me, that everyone else is clued into a group consciousness from which I’m excluded. Like something in me is broken. As time passes I become more comfortable with this strange sense of being apart, but it never leaves, and on occasion, I go through phases of intense and debilitating anxiety. Gnarly fucking panic attacks. Perhaps it is a form of self-loathing, that I’m often unable to find comfort in community. Am I the only one who’s fucked up like this? Can I get a witness?

I sat on the couch for a while as Augustus searched for his keys. His mom sat down next to me and said, “I just love this one, don’t you?” I guess I had been looking toward the Encouragement above the TV, a drawing of an angel with the caption Without Pain, How Could We Know Joy? (This is an old argument in the field of Thinking About Suffering, and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries, but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not in any way affect the taste of chocolate.) “Yes,” I said. “A lovely thought.

My father had died when I was young, before I learned that there was anything stronger than he was. I'd been operating without that kind of support for my whole life. Molly was only now realizing that, in some ways, she was on her own. I wondered if my daughter even knew that she had a father, if she knew that there was someone who wanted, desperately, to Show Up. "You get yourself an apartment and your plumbing goes bad, he'll still be there," I said quietly. "Some guy breaks your heart, he'll come over with ice cream. A lot of people never have a dad willing to do that stuff. Most of the time, it matters a hell of a lot more.

Plouă, plouă, plouă, Vreme de beție - Și s-asculți pustiul, Ce melancolie! Plouă, plouă, plouă…

The morning interviews were always the hardest, hung-over, trying to get the beer down. No, I have no idea why I am a writer. No, my writing has no particular meaning that I know of. Celine? Oh sure. Why not? Do I like women? Well, I’d rather fuck most of them than live with them. What do I think is important? Good wine, good plumbing and to be able to sleep late in the mornings. Are you really disturbing me? Of course you are. Do you expect me to start lying at the age of 58? Buy me a drink.

People didn't like having to come up with something smart or helpful or sensitive to say, and they weren't intelligent enough to realize that all we wanted, all I wanted, was to be treated the same as I had been three months before. I wanted to be ignored because of my eccentricities, not because of my brother. And I wanted to be offered help from people because they cared about me, not because they felt some strange social obligation to do so. I wanted the world to sit back, listen up, and let me explain to it that when someone is sad and hopeless, the last thing they need to feel is that they are the only ones in the world with that feeling. So, if you feel sorry for someone, don't pretend to be happy. Don't pretend to care only about their problems. People aren't stupid. Not all of us, anyway. If someone's little brother disappears, don't give him a free hamburger to make him feel better-- it doesn't work. It's a good burger, sure, but it means nothing. It means something only to the Mr. Burkes of the world. Offering free meals, free stays in condos in Florida, even free plumbing. And we let them. We let them because they need it, not us. We didn't let them help us because we needed it, we let them help us because inside of humans is this thing, this unnamed need to feel as if we were useful in the world. To feel as if we have something significant to contribute. So, old ladies, make your casseroles and set them on doorsteps. And old men, grill your burgers and give them to teenagers with cynical worldviews. The world can't be satisfied, but that need to fix it all can.

Therapists instead prefer to take on YAVIS—Young, Attractive, Verbal, Intelligent, and Successful clients.[3] They love an amenable type, someone who is curious about their internal workings and eager to plumb them, someone who’s already read articles in The New Yorker about psychology to familiarize them with the language of metacognition and congruence. Good luck if you’re a regular-ass Joe who’d rather watch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

‎Maeniel felt this was why all the great sages never wrote anything down. In the final analysis, scriptures are futile things, dependent as they are on the intentions of the interpreter. All too often too literal a mind can lead human students into strange follies. Sometimes it is better to allow the searchers to try to plumb the depths of the great mystery on their own and accept that not every one of those taking the road will see the same end.

Ever since I could remember, I'd been engaging in literary transference/transplantation/translation from one culture to another. Growing up on English literature, I taught myself to see my daily reality reflected in my reading material, while plumbing its universal truths in search of particulars... In reading English literature with a Pakistani lense, it seemed to me that all cultures were concerned with the same eternal questions and that people were more similar to one another than they were different. As Alys Binat says in Unmarriagble, "Reading widely can lead to an appreciation of the universalities across cultures." But as Valentine Darsee says, "We've been forced to seek ourselves in the literature of others for too long.

How fathomless the mystery of the Unseen is! We cannot plumb its depths with our feeble senses - with eyes which cannot see the infinitely small or the infinitely great, nor anything too close or too distant, such as the beings who live on a star or the creatures which live in a drop of water... with ears that deceive us by converting vibrations of the air into tones that we can hear, for they are sprites which miraculously change movement into sound, a metamorphosis which gives birth to harmonies which turn the silent agitation of nature into song... with our sense of smell, which is poorer than any dog's... with our sense of taste, which is barely capable of detecting the age of a wine! Ah! If we had other senses which would work other miracles for us, how many more things would we not discover around us!

It was the blue-tinged taste of a regret so deep you could never plumb its depths. It was the victory at Rajal that never came, it was his brother walking away down the long dark wood corridor, it was a life he might have had in Yhelteth if disgust and fury had not sent him away in disgrace instead. It was the slaves he could not free, the screaming women and children of Ennishmin he could not save, the piled-up, silent dead and the smashed-in, ruined homes. It was every wrong decision he'd ever made, every path he'd failed to walk, fanned out and held up for him to understand, and it hurt.

The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs. This was March, but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to the embankment. At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time to see everything about her—her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever-seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that ‘It isn’t the same for them as it would be for us,’ and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her—understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe.

In all honesty, men changed a few rules when they became what was referred to as househusbands. Bill didn't make beds, cook, dust, do laundry, windows or floors, or give birth. What he did do was pay bills, call people to fix the plumbing, handle the investments and taxes, volunteer big time, take papers to the garage, change license plates, get the cars serviced, and pick up the cleaning. If women had had that kind of schedule, who knows, we'd probably still be in the home.

There are six canons of conservative thought: 1) Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems. A narrow rationality, what Coleridge called the Understanding, cannot of itself satisfy human needs. "Every Tory is a realist," says Keith Feiling: "he knows that there are great forces in heaven and earth that man's philosophy cannot plumb or fathom." True politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which ought to prevail in a community of souls. 2) Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems; conservatives resist what Robert Graves calls "Logicalism" in society. This prejudice has been called "the conservatism of enjoyment"--a sense that life is worth living, according to Walter Bagehot "the proper source of an animated Conservatism." 3) Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a "classless society." With reason, conservatives have been called "the party of order." If natural distinctions are effaced among men, oligarchs fill the vacuum. Ultimate equality in the judgment of God, and equality before courts of law, are recognized by conservatives; but equality of condition, they think, means equality in servitude and boredom. 4) Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked: separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all. Economic levelling, they maintain, is not economic progress. 5) Faith in prescription and distrust of "sophisters, calculators, and economists" who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs. Custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man's anarchic impulse and upon the innovator's lust for power. 6) Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress. Society must alter, for prudent change is the means of social preservation; but a statesman must take Providence into his calculations, and a statesman's chief virtue, according to Plato and Burke, is prudence.

In a French accent developed through a lifetime of using English I said, 'Hello sir, I would like to row the English Channel in a bath please.' What actually arrived in the ear of the French Navy man was, 'Hello sire, I would like to fight a condom across a bath if you please.

For he had learned tonight that love was not enough. There had to be a higher devotion than all the devotions of this fond imprisonment. There had to be a larger world than this glittering fragment of a world with all its wealth and privilege. Throughout his whole youth and early manhood, this very world of beauty, ease, and luxury, of power, glory, and security, had seemed the ultimate end of human ambition, the furthermost limit to which the aspirations of any man could reach. But tonight, in a hundred separate moment of intense reality, it had revealed to him its very core. He had seen it naked, with its guards down. He had sensed how the hollow pyramid of a false social structure had been erected and sustained upon a base of common mankind's blood and sweat and agony...Privilege and truth could not lie down together. He thought of how a silver dollar, if held close enough to the eye, could blot out the sun itself. There were stronger, deeper tides and currents running in America than any which these glamorous lives tonight had ever plumbed or even dreamed of. Those were the depths he would like to sound.

Who among us has not suddenly looked into his child's face, in the midst of the toils and troubles of everyday life, and at that moment "seen" that everything which is good, is loved and lovable, loved by God! Such certainties all mean, at bottom, one and the same thing: that the world is plumb and sound; that everything comes to its appointed goal; that in spite of all appearances, underlying all things is - peace, salvation, gloria; that nothing and no one is lost; that "God holds in his hand the beginning, middle, and end of all that is." Such nonrational, intuitive certainties of the divine base of all that is can be vouchsafed to our gaze even when it is turned toward the most insignificant-looking things, if only it is a gaze inspired by love. That, in the precise sense, is contemplation... Out of this kind of contemplation of the created world arise in never-ending wealth all true poetry and all real art, for it is the nature of poetry and art to be paean and praise heard above all the wails of lamentation. No one who is not capable of such contemplation can grasp poetry in a poetic fashion, that is to say, in the only meaningful fashion. The indispensability, the vital function of the arts in man's life, consists above all in this: that through them contemplation of the created world is kept alive and active.

Now as you plumb out into the universe and explore it astronomically, it gets very strange. You begin to see things in the depths that at first sight seem utterly remote. How could they have anything to do with us. They are so far off and so unlikely. And in the same way, when you start probing into the inner workings of the human body you come across all kinds of funny little monsters and wiggly things that bear no resemblance to what we recognize as the human image. Look at a spermatozoon under a microscope. That little tadpole! And how can that have any connection with a grown human being. It’s so unlike, you see. It’s foreign feeling. And you get the creeps, a foreign feeling, about yourself...But what we will always find out in the end when we meet the very strange thing, there will one day be the dawning recognition: Why that’s me.

Was she conscious of her talent? Hardly. If asked about her cooking, Grandma would look down at her hands which some glorious instinct sent on journeys to be gloved in flour, or to plumb disencumbered turkeys, wrist-deep in search of their animal souls. Her gray eyes blinked from spectacles warped by forty years of oven blasts and blinded with strewing of pepper and sage, so she sometimes flung cornstarch over steaks, amazingly tender, succulent steaks! And sometimes dropped apricots into meat loaves, cross-pollinated meats, herbs, fruits, vegetables with no prejudice, no tolerance for recipe or formula, save that at the final moment of delivery, mouths watered, blood thundered in response. Her hands then, like the hands of Great-grandma before her, were Grandma's mystery, delight, and life. She looked at them in astonishment, but let them live their life in the way they must absolutely lead it.

1 One went to the door of the Beloved and knocked. A voice asked: “Who is there?” He answered: “It is I.” The voice said: “There is no room here for me and thee.” The door was shut. After a year of solitude and deprivation this man returned to the door of the Beloved. He knocked. A voice from within asked: “Who is there?” The man said: “It is Thou.” The door was opened for him. 2 The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere, they’re in each other all along. 3 Love is from the infinite, and will remain until eternity. The seeker of love escapes the chains of birth and death. Tomorrow, when resurrection comes, The heart that is not in love will fail the test. 4 When your chest is free of your limiting ego, Then you will see the ageless Beloved. You can not see yourself without a mirror; Look at the Beloved, He is the brightest mirror. 5 Your love lifts my soul from the body to the sky And you lift me up out of the two worlds. I want your sun to reach my raindrops, So your heat can raise my soul upward like a cloud. 6 There is a candle in the heart of man, waiting to be kindled. In separation from the Friend, there is a cut waiting to be stitched. O, you who are ignorant of endurance and the burning fire of love– Love comes of its own free will, it can’t be learned in any school. 7 There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired, as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts from books and from what the teacher says, collecting information from the traditional sciences as well as from the new sciences. With such intelligence you rise in the world. You get ranked ahead or behind others in regard to your competence in retaining information. You stroll with this intelligence in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more marks on your preserving tablets. There is another kind of tablet, one already completed and preserved inside you. A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness in the center of the chest. This other intelligence does not turn yellow or stagnate. It’s fluid, and it doesn’t move from outside to inside through conduits of plumbing-learning. This second knowing is a fountainhead from within you, moving out.

Can such a man, you ask, be a leader of the masses? Surprisingly, the answer is yes. The masses — by which I mean not the proletariat, but the anonymous collective body into which all of us, high and low, amalgamate at certain moments — react most strongly to someone who least resembles them. Normality coupled with talent may make a politician popular. But to provoke extremes of love and hate, to be worshipped like a god or loathed like the devil, is given only to a truly exceptional person who is poles apart from the masses, be it far above or far below them. If my experience of Germany has taught me anything, it is this: Rathenau and Hitler are the two men who excited the imagination of the German masses to the utmost; the one by his ineffable culture, the other by his ineffable vileness. Both, and this is decisive, came from inaccessible regions, from some sort of “beyond.” The one from a sphere of sublime spirituality where the cultures of three millennia and two continents hold a symposium; the other from a jungle far below the depths plumbed by the basest penny dreadfuls, from an underworld where demons rise from a brewed-up stench of petty-bourgeois back rooms, doss-houses, barrack latrines, and the hangman’s yard. From their different “beyonds” they both drew

For you, a thousand times over." "Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill them with your favorite colors." "...attention shifted to him like sunflowers turning to the sun." "But even when he wasn't around, he was." "When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal a wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. There is no act more wretched than stealing." "...she had a voice that made me think of warm milk and honey." "My heart stuttered at the thought of her." "...and I would walk by, pretending not to know her, but dying to." "It turned out that, like satan, cancer had many names." "Every woman needed a husband, even if he did silence the song in her." "The first time I saw the Pacific, I almost cried." "Proud. His eyes gleamed when he said that and I liked being on the receiving end of that look." "Make morning into a key and throw it into the well, Go slowly, my lovely moon, go slowly. Let the morning sun forget to rise in the East, Go slowly, lovely moon, go slowly." "Men are easy,... a man's plumbing is like his mind: simple, very few surprises. You ladies, on the other hand... well, God put a lot of thought into making you." "All my life, I'd been around men. That night, I discovered the tenderness of a woman." "And I could almost feel the emptiness in [her] womb, like it was a living, breathing thing. It had seeped into our marriage, that emptiness, into our laughs, and our lovemaking. And late at night, in the darkness of our room, I'd feel it rising from [her] and settling between us. Sleeping between us. Like a newborn child." "America was a river, roaring along unmindful of the past. I could wade into this river, let my sins drown to the bottom, let the waters carry me someplace far. Someplace with no ghosts, no memories, and no sins. If for nothing else, for that I embraced America." "...and every day I thank [God] that I am alive, not because I fear death, but because my wife has a husband and my son is not an orphan." "...lifting him from the certainty of turmoil and dropping him in a turmoil of uncertainty." "...sometimes the dead are luckier." "He walked like he was afraid to leave behind footprints. He moved as if not to stir the air around him." "...and when she locked her arms around my neck, when I smelled apples in her hair, I realized how much I had missed her. 'You're still the morning sun to me...' I whispered." "...there is a God, there always has been. I see him here, in the eys of the people in this [hospital] corridor of desperation. This is the real house of God, this is where those who have lost God will find Him... there is a God, there has to be, and now I will pray, I will pray that He will forgive that I have neglected Him all of these years, forgive that I have betrayed, lied, and sinned with impunity only to turn to Him now in my hour of need. I pray that He is as merciful, benevolent, and gracious as His book says He is.

When I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from the schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time. What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain't a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be content.