Pots Quotes

Oh, we're playing nice now? Shall we have tea first? Brew up a nice pot of kiss-my-ass?

They lie about marijuana. Tell you pot-smoking makes you unmotivated. Lie! When you're high, you can do everything you normally do just as well — you just realize that it's not worth the fucking effort. There is a difference.

We search for happiness everywhere, but we are like Tolstoy's fabled beggar who spent his life sitting on a pot of gold, under him the whole time. Your treasure--your perfection--is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the buy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart.

It's a good thing most people bleed on the inside or this would be a gory, blood-smeared earth.

No, my friend. We are lunatics from the hospital up the highway, psycho-ceramics, the cracked pots of mankind. Would you like me to decipher a Rorschach for you?

Serving” is assisting your fellow man, the how-to, practical way to thrust your life into the spiritual wall to make the
tunnel bigger. Will God suddenly appear? Does
washing stacks of pots and pans bring salvation? Can pulling weeds reclaim your brain? Will mopping the floor make you equal to the richest of men?

I have been in Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and a sword in my hands.

I just love family meetings. Very cozy, with the Christmas garlands round the fireplace and a nice pot of tea and a detective from Scotland Yard ready to arrest you.

Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.

-Suntem diferiți… Ce iubești la mine? -Tot ce nu pot fi eu…

Always start out with a larger pot than what you think you need.

You're getting into some kind of shape, cop." Aw, come on, now." Butch grinned. "Don't let that shower we took go to your head." Rhage fired a towel at the male. "Just pointing out your beer gut's gone." It was a Scotch pot. And I don't miss it.

Something else is hurting you—that’s why you need pot or whiskey, or whips and rubber suits, or screaming music turned so fucking loud you can’t think.

It's all right to sit on your pity pot every now and again. Just be sure to flush when you are finished. Mrs. Miracle

Hi, pot. It’s me, kettle,” Sophia snapped back. “Hi kettle, you have about thirty seconds before this pot kicks your ass.

How dreadful...to be caught up in a game and have no idea of the rules.

A philosophical question: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? And if a woman who's wholly alone occasionally talks to a pot plant, is she certifiable? I think that it is perfectly normal to talk to oneself occasionally. It's not as though I'm expecting a reply. I'm fully aware that Polly is a houseplant.

I've heard that people stand in bad situations because a relationship like that gets turned up by degrees. It is said that a frog will jump out of a pot of boiling water. Place him in a pot and turn it up a little at a time, and he will stay until he is boiled to death. Us frogs understand this.

He should not be here, " said the fish in the pot. " he should not be here when your mother is not.

There is a Beautiful Creature Living in a hole you have dug. So at night I set fruit and grains And little pots of wine and milk Besides your soft earthen mounds, And I often sing. But still, my dear, You do not come out. I have fallen in love with Someone Who hides inside you. We should talk about this problem-- Otherwise, I will never leave you alone.

We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move. We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable. We work with being, but non-being is what we use.

But... you're still getting married?" Grover sounded hurt. "Who's the bride?" Ploypemus looked toward the boiling pot. Clarisse made a strangled sound. "Oh, no! You can't be serious. I'm not-

Awakened to the crow of a rooster almost old enough to retire to a cooking pot.

He had heard about talking to plants in the early seventies, on Radio Four, and thought it was an excellent idea. Although talking is perhaps the wrong word for what Crowley did. What he did was put the fear of God into them. More precisely, the fear of Crowley. In addition to which, every couple of months Crowley would pick out a plant that was growing too slowly, or succumbing to leaf-wilt or browning, or just didn't look quite as good as the others, and he would carry it around to all the other plants. "Say goodbye to your friend," he'd say to them. "He just couldn't cut it. . . " Then he would leave the flat with the offending plant, and return an hour or so later with a large, empty flower pot, which he would leave somewhere conspicuously around the flat. The plants were the most luxurious, verdant, and beautiful in London. Also the most terrified.

Waiting for the fish to bite or waiting for wind to fly a kite. Or waiting around for Friday night or waiting perhaps for their Uncle Jake or a pot to boil or a better break or a string of pearls or a pair of pants or a wig with curls or another chance. Everyone is just waiting.

No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it.

Why am I so drawn to you?" He muttered, almost to himself. "Why is it so hard to let go? I thought... at first... it was Ariella, that you remind me of so much. But it's not." Though he didn't smile, his eyes lightened a shade. "You're far more stubborn than she ever was." I sniffed. "That's like the pot calling the kettle black," I whispered, and a faint, tiny grin finally crossed his face, before his expression clouded and he lowered his head, touching his forehead to mine. "What do you want of me, Meghan?" he asked, a low thread of anguish flickering below the surface. Tears blurred my vision, all the fear and heartache of the past few days rising to the surface. "Just you," I whispered. "I just want you." -Ash and Meghan

Love is the very essence of life. It is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Yet it is not found only at the end of the rainbow. Love is at the beginning also, and from it springs the beauty that arched across the sky on a stormy day. Love is the security for which children weep, the yearning of youth, the adhesive that binds marriage, and the lubricant that prevents devastating friction in the home; it is the peace of old age, the sunlight of hope shining through death. How rich are those who enjoy it in their associations with family, friends, and neighbors! Love, like faith, is a gift of God. It is also the most enduring and most powerful virtue.

Hi, my name is Kurt Cobain, I'm homosexual, I'm a pagan, I'm a drug abuser, and I like to fuck pot-bellied pigs!

Me: “I refuse to attend Support Group.” Mom: “One of the symptoms of depression is disinterest in activities.” Me: “Please just let me watch America’s Next Top Model. It’s an activity.” Mom: “Television is a passivity.” Me: “Ugh, Mom, please.” Mom: “Hazel, you’re a teenager. You’re not a little kid anymore. You need to make friends, get out of the house, and live your life.” Me: “If you want me to be a teenager, don’t send me to Support Group. Buy me a fake ID so I can go to clubs, drink vodka, and take pot.” Mom: “You don’t take pot, for starters.” Me: “See, that’s the kind of thing I’d know if you got me a fake ID.” Mom: “You’re going to Support Group.” Me: “UGGGGGGGGGGGGG.” Mom: “Hazel, you deserve a life.

For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.

Morning is an important time of day, because how you spend your morning can often tell you what kind of day you are going to have. For instance, if you wake up to the sound of twittering birds, and find yourself in an enormous canopy bed, with a butler standing next to you holding a breakfast of freshly made muffins and hand-squeezed orange juice on a silver tray, you will know that your day will be a splendid one. If you wake up to the sound of church bells, and find yourself in a fairly big regular bed, with a butler standing next to you holding a breakfast of hot tea and toast on a plate, you will know that your day will be O.K. And if you wake up to the sound of somebody banging two metal pots together, and find yourself in a small bunk bed, with a nasty foreman standing in the doorway holding no breakfast at all, you will know that your day will be horrid.

God knows the mess we’re in when He calls us. His light shines greater through “cracked pots” than it does through those who have it all together.

If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. If this world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser, and the pot is calling the kettle black.

All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides,' and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot.

She was cold by nature, self-love predominating over passion; rather than being virtuous, she preferred to have her pleasures all to herself.

Instructions for Adam Look after no one except yourself. Go to university and make lots of friends and get drunk. Forget your door keyes. Laugh. Eat pot-noodles for breakfast. Miss lectures. Be irresponsible.

A little girl came home from school with a drawing she'd made in class.She danced into the kitchen ,where her mother was preparing dinner. "Mom,guess what ?" she squealed waving the drawing . her mother never looked up. "what"? she said ,tending to the pots. "guess what?" the child repeated ,waving the drawings. "what?" the mother said , tending to the plates. "Mom, you're not listening" "sweetie,yes I am" "Mom" the child said "you're not listening with your EYES

Clary stopped wondering about peanut-fish-olive-tomato soup and started wondering what would happen if she dumped the contents of the pot on Isabelle’s head.

When you stay too long in the same place, things and people go to pot on you, they rot and start stinking for your special benefit.

I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.

At the end of the rainbow waited the pot of gold. But rainbows were made of faint and fragile gossamer-and gold weighed a ton-and since the world began, gold was the reason to do most anything.

Eu nu pot să nu te iubesc. Tu nu ştii de ce, şi nu ţi-o pot spune, şi cu toate astea chipul tău, umbra ce-ai aruncat-o pe pânza gândurilor mele este singura fericire ce am avut-o în lume.

The first coffee of the morning is never, ever, ready quickly enough. You die before it’s ready and then your ghost pours the resurrection potion out of the moka pot.

even a cracked pot has a lid that fits.

Stop smiling!” she ordered. “I can see you, Carter. Oh…and, uh, hullo, Walt.” The pot monster made squeaky grinding noises as it stood up straight. One clunky arm rose and tried to fix Sadie’s nonexistent hair. Leave it to Sadie to be self-conscious around boys, even when she’s made out of pots and duct tape.

It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth. That gave you a reason for going on. Pumpkin.

Eve was still frowning at the pasta like she suspected it was going to do something clever, like try to escape from the pot.

And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

Mama's love had always been the kind that acted itself out with soup pot and sewing basket. But now that these things were taken away, the love seemed as whole as before. She sat in her chair at the window and loved us. She loved the people she saw in the street-- and beyond: her love took in the city, the land of Holland, the world. And so I learned that love is larger than the walls which shut it in.

Mr. Pot drank ten pots of coffee, even though I only made eight. That’s a savings of 20%!


The heat of the summer transformed the green grass into long brown straw, only the weeds were green. Claire didn't mind, the weeds had pretty flowers. Unlike Tony's flowers, which had been sentenced to his yard, gardens, or clay pots, these flowers grew free wherever they wanted. Furthermore, weeds were survivors. When all else died, the weeds remained. Yes, Claire liked weeds.

But [Pooh] couldn't sleep. The more he tried to sleep the more he couldn't. He tried counting Sheep, which is sometimes a good way of getting to sleep, and, as that was no good, he tried counting Heffalumps. And that was worse. Because every Heffalump that he counted was making straight for a pot of Pooh's honey, and eating it all. For some minutes he lay there miserably, but when the five hundred and eighty-seventh Heffalump was licking its jaws, and saying to itself, "Very good honey this, I don't know when I've tasted better," Pooh could bear it no longer.

Place a beehive on my grave And let the honey soak through. When I'm dead and gone, That's what I want from you. The streets of heaven are gold and sunny, But I'll stick with my plot and a pot of honey. Place a beehive on my grave And let the honey soak through.

Thankfully the rest of the world assumed that the Irish were crazy, a theory that the Irish themselves did nothing to debunk. They had somehow got it into their heads that each fairy lugged around a pot of gold with him wherever he went. While it was true that LEP had a ransom fund, because of its officers' high-risk occupation, no human had ever taken a chunk of it yet. This didn't stop the Irish population in general from skulking around rainbows, hoping to win the supernatural lottery.

Amintirile nu ne mai pot omorî; cel mult pot face o rană să doară şi să sângereze din nou.

Remembering our past, carrying it around with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends. They are our mirror; our memory; we ask nothing of them but that they polish the mirror from time to time so we can look at ourselves in it.

Banii se pot cheltui, chiar pierde. Averea minţii rămâne însă neatinsă: nu s-a născut până acum hoţul care s-o fure.

You forget all of it anyway. First, you forget everything you learned-the dates of the Hay-Herran Treaty and Pythagorean Theorem. You especially forget everything you didn't really learn, but just memorized the night before. You forget the names of all but one or two of your teachers, and eventually you'll forget those, too. You forget your junior class schedule and where you used to sit and your best friend's home phone number and the lyrics to that song you must have played a million times. For me, it was something by Simon & Garfunkel. Who knows what it will be for you? And eventually, but slowly, oh so slowly, you forget your humiliations-even the ones that seemed indelible just fade away. You forget who was cool and who was not, who was pretty, smart, athletic, and not. Who went to a good college. Who threw the best parties Who could get you pot. You forget all of them. Even the ones you said you loved, and even the ones you actually did. They're the last to go. And then once you've forgotten enough, you love someone else.

Amy gritted her teeth. "King Louis XVI even put Franklin's picture on a chamber pot!" Jonah looked at his dad. "Do we have souvenir chamber pots?" "No." His dad whipped out his phone. "I'll make the call.

In short, if we wish to see anything sensible done about the situation, we will clearly have to do it ourselves.

Do you know what happens, Etienne,” says Madame Manec from the other side of the kitchen, “when you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water?” “You will tell us, I am sure.” “It jumps out. But do you know what happens when you put the frog in a pot of cool water and then slowly bring it to a boil? You know what happens then?” Marie-Laure waits. The potatoes steam. Madame Manec says, “The frog cooks.

Random chance was not a sufficient explanation of the Universe---in fact, random chance was not sufficient to explain random chance; the pot could not hold itself.

a pot a cook but the food na kno

a friend with weed is a friend indeed...

Life is a stew, and pot is poop.If someone stirred even a teeny-bit of poop in the stew, would you really want to eat it?

In March several of the Mandrakes threw a loud and raucous party in greenhouse three. This made Professor Sprout very happy. “The moment they start trying to move into each other’s pots, we’ll know they’re fully mature,” she told Harry.

If you throw a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will hop right out. But if you put that frog in a pot of tepid water and slowly warm it, the frog doesn't figure out what going on until it's too late. Boiled frog. It's just a metter of working by slow degrees.

Gratitude is the real treasure God wants us to find, because it isn't the pot of gold but the rainbow that colors our world.

Tree It is foolish to let a young redwood grow next to a house. Even in this one lifetime, you will have to choose. That great calm being, this clutter of soup pots and books-- Already the first branch-tips brush at the window. Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

Careful, pot" Tod said. "Someone might notice your resemblance to the kettle.

Ea a renuntat la toate pentru el. Dar barbatii nu pot sa traiasca numai pentru iubire.

Oh, we're playing nice now?” Puck remained seated, looking anything but compliant. “Shall we have tea first? Brew up a nice pot of kiss-my-ass?

His name tasted of fire and wings, of curling smoke, of subtlety and strength and the rasping whisper of scales. He eyed me and said stiffly, "Don't land yourself into a boiling-pot, and as difficult as you may find it, try and present a respectable appearance.

Craftsmanship isn't like water in an earthen pot, to be taken out by the dipperful until it's empty. No, the more drawn out the more remains.

To ask them to legalize pot is something like asking them to put butter on the handcuffs before they place them on you: something else is hurting you—that's why you need pot, or whiskey, or whips and rubber suits, or screaming music turned so fucking loud you can't think. Or madhouses or mechanical cunts or 162 baseball games in a season. Or Vietnam or Israel or the fear of spiders.

Sometimes it's important to work for that pot of gold. But other times it's essential to take time off and to make sure that your most important decision in the day simply consists of choosing which color to slide down on the rainbow.

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison.

Mi-ai otrăvit sângele şi nu mai pot trăi fără otrava ta.

That cat was a spy. You had to take a pot shot at it. It was a very clever German midget dressed up in a cheap fur coat.

i love playing and chatting with children...feeding and putting them to bed with a little story, and being away from the family has troubled me throughout my...life. i like relaxing at the house, reading quietly, taking in the sweet smell that comes from the pots, sitting around a table with the family and taking out my wife and children. when you can no longer enjoy these simple pleasures something valuable is taken away from your life and you feel it in your daily work.

Singurul sfat pe care eu pot să îl dau cu inima împăcată este: Dormiți! Dormiți, fraților, că somnul n-a făcut rău nimănui! Ești trist? Culcă-te! Ești nervos? Culcă-te! Vrei să mori? Culcă-te, poate ai noroc și mori în somn!

We have become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.

Then, like I wasn't thrown enough, Cal leaned down and picked up a potted African violet on the low table next to the sofa and brought it over to me. For a second, I wondered if this was his socially awkward way of trying to give me flowers.

She could walk through a lightning storm without being touched; grab a bolt of lightning in the palm of her hand; use the heat of lightning to start the kindling going under her medicine pot. She turned the moon into salve, the stars into swaddling cloth, and healed the wounds of every creature walking up on two or down on four.

When everyone is trying to be something, be nothing. Range with emptiness. Human should be like a pot. As the pot is hold by its emptiness inside, human is hold by the awareness of his nothingness.

Let me ask you outright, gentle reader, if there have not been hours, indeed whole days and weeks of your life, during which all your usual activities were painfully repugnant, and everything you believed in and valued seemed foolish and worthless?

How are your accommodations?” Dalinar asked. “Sir? I’m in storming prison.” A smile cracked Dalinar’s face. “So I see. Calm yourself, soldier. If I’d ordered you to guard a room for a week, would you have done it?” “Yes.” “Then consider this your duty. Guard this room.” “I’ll make sure nobody unauthorized runs off with the chamber pot, sir.

From the window, above the clatter of pots and the slamming of cabinets, Francis was singing, as though it was the happiest song in the world: 'We are the little black sheep who have gone astray . . . Baa baa baa . . . Gentlemen songsters off on a spree . . . Doomed from here to eternity . . .

Oh, Black known and unknown poets, how often have your auctioned pains sustained us? Who will compute the lonely nights made less lonely by your songs, or by the empty pots made less tragic by your tales? If we were a people much given to revealing secrets, we might raise monuments and sacrifice to the memories of our poets, but slavery cured us of that weakness.

Janie: Did you ever sell drugs? Cabel: Yes. Pot. Ninth and tenth grade. I was, uh...rather troubled back then. Janie: Why did you stop? Cabel: Got busted, and Captain made me a better deal. Janie: So you've been a narc since then? Cabel: I cringe at your terminology.

If we’re not going to get married, we need to break up. So…shit or get off the pot, honey.” “That was beautiful,” murmured Father Bruce as he opened a menu.

A flower blooms best in a happy pot.

If you see Myrnin, tell him I said I want my slow cooker back." "Your- You let him borrow something you put food in?" Hannah's smile disappeared. "Why?" "Um, never mind. I'll make sure it gets disinfected before you get it back. But don't lend anything to him again unless you can put it in some kind of sterilizer." That made even Hannah look nervous. "Thanks. Tell crazy boy I said hey." "I will" Claire promised. "Hey, if you don't mind me asking - when did he borrow it from you?" "He just showed up at my door one night about a week ago, said, 'Hi, nice to meet you. Can I borrow your Crock-Pot?' Which I understand is pretty typical Myrnin.

Ni muer ni viu ni no guaris, Ni mal no·m sent e si l’ai gran, Quar de s’amor no suy devis, Ni no sai si ja n’aurai ni quan, Qu’en lieys es tota le mercés Que·m pot sorzer o decazer.” “Not dying nor living nor healing, there is no pain in my sickness, for I am not kept from her love. I don’t know if I will ever have it, for all the mercy that makes me flourish or decay is in her power.

The drug war is a total scam, prescription drugs kill 300K a year, while marijuana kills no one, but they spend billions/year 'fighting' it, because pot heads make for good little slaves to put into private prisons, owned by the banks who launder the drug money, and it's ALL DOCUMENTED.

Breakfast is the only meal of the day that I tend to view with the same kind of traditionalized reverence that most people associate with Lunch and Dinner. I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas or at home — and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed — breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crepes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned beef hash with diced chiles, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of Key lime pie, two margaritas, and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert… Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next twenty-four hours and at least one source of good music… All of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked.

It’s mind-blowing and delicious and better than finding a pot of gold, a unicorn, and a leprechaun who shits diamonds at the end of a rainbow.

Marriage without struggle is like an unfired clay pot. It is easily made, but it will not stand the test of time.

For me starting the day without a pot of tea would be a day forever out of kilter.

The people who invented the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently,” he said. "The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, Germany, and Japan do not encourage this different thinking. The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set that is great for imagining a world not yet in existence.

I feel like I need to speak out, because if no one speaks out, if no one says, this is me, this is what I believe in, and this is why I'm different, and this is why that's okay, then what's the point? What's the point of living in this beautiful, great melting pot where everyone can dare be anything they want to be?

Mother Nature is a freaky lady who probably created pot so she could spend all her time smoking it.

I like pouring your tea, lifting the heavy pot, and tipping it up, so the fragrant liquid streams in your china cup. Or when you’re away, or at work, I like to think of your cupped hands as you sip, as you sip, of the faint half-smile of your lips. I like the questions – sugar? – milk? – and the answers I don’t know by heart, yet, for I see your soul in your eyes, and I forget. Jasmine, Gunpowder, Assam, Earl Grey, Ceylon, I love tea’s names. Which tea would you like? I say but it’s any tea for you, please, any time of day, as the women harvest the slopes for the sweetest leaves, on Mount Wu-Yi, and I am your lover, smitten, straining your tea. - Tea

It is true, of course, that there is no way of knowing for sure whether or not you can trust someone, for the simple reason that circumstances change all of the time. You might know someone for several years, for instance, and trust him completely as your friend, but circumstances could change and he could become very hungry, and before you knew it you could be boiling in a soup pot, because there is no way of knowing for sure.

Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.

For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution.

Me: "If you want me to be a teenager, don't send me to Support Group. Buy me a fake ID so I can go to clubs, drink vodka, and take pot." Mom: "You don't take pot, for starters." Me: "See, that's the kind of thing I'd know if you got me a fake ID.

I think pot should be legal. I don’t smoke it, but I like the smell of it.

A person of high, rare mental gifts who is forced into a job which is merely useful is like a valuable vase decorated with the most beautiful painting and then used as a kitchen pot.

The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to the cops just isn't going to work. This thinking is fostered by the establishment; they like nothing better than love and nonviolence. The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.

Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table--it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket--that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep.

A student once asked anthropologist Margaret Mead, “What is the earliest sign of civilization?” The student expected her to say a clay pot, a grinding stone, or maybe a weapon. Margaret Mead thought for a moment, then she said, “A healed femur.” A femur is the longest bone in the body, linking hip to knee. In societies without the benefits of modern medicine, it takes about six weeks of rest for a fractured femur to heal. A healed femur shows that someone cared for the injured person, did their hunting and gathering, stayed with them, and offered physical protection and human companionship until the injury could mend. Mead explained that where the law of the jungle—the survival of the fittest—rules, no healed femurs are found. The first sign of civilization is compassion, seen in a healed femur.

More chibis," said Simon gloomily. All the characters on-screen had turned into inch-high baby versions of themselves and were chasing each other around waving pots and pans. "I'm changing the channel," Simon announced, seizing the remote. "I'm tired of this anime. I can't tell what the plot is and no one ever has sex." "Of course they don't," Clary said, taking another chip. "Anime is wholesome family entertainment." "If you're in the mood for less wholesome entertainment, we could try the porn channels," Simon observed. "Would you rather watch The Witches of Breastwick or As I Lay Dianne?

Griffin can't be a dad, Kiera. He just can't. He blows pot into puppies faces, Kiera! Can you picture him around a child?

Are we just going to stand here taking pot shots at each other? Or can we focus our collective ADD on getting us off this shit hole? (Devyn)

We may not always be happy with the things we do. Talking it through properly with ourselves to get an answer to the missteps we make is essential. We might thus receive an explanation for our blunders. Instead of encaging our emotions, let us go down into the dark net of our subconscious and start transforming our inner world by uncluttering the melting pot of our sensibilities and tuning up our thinking patterns. This may be the start of a new day. (“The infinite Wisdom of Meditation“)

If you took a cracked pot and you cracked that cracked pot, you'd be approaching the level of cracked pottery we are talking about here.

out of the arms... out of the arms of one love and into the arms of another I have been saved from dying on the cross by a lady who smokes pot writes songs and stories, and is much kinder than the last, much much kinder, and the sex is just as good or better. it isn't pleasant to be put on the cross and left there, it is much more pleasant to forget a love which didn't work as all love finally doesn't work... it is much more pleasant to make love along the shore in Del Mar in room 42, and afterwards sitting up in bed drinking good wine, talking and touching smoking listening to the waves... I have died too many times believing and waiting, waiting in a room staring at a cracked ceiling waiting for the phone, a letter, a knock, a sound... going wild inside while she danced with strangers in nightclubs... out of the arms of one love and into the arms of another it's not pleasant to die on the cross, it's much more pleasant to hear your name whispered in the dark.

Here is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust to make the world intolerable. Its habitat is the United States. Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty as it hates truth.

There is nothing that is quite so reassuring in an awkward situation as knowing that one is well turned-out, and while I hope I am not so fainthearted as to require such stratagems, I am not so foolish as to overlook their value.

… that sour blend of loneliness and lust for recognition, shyness and extravagance, deep insecurity and self-intoxicated egomania, that drives poets and writers out of their rooms to seek each other out, to rub shoulders with one another, bully, joke, condescend, feel each other, lay a hand on a shoulder or an arm round a waist, to chat and argue with little nudges, to spy a little, sniff out what is cooking in other pots, flatter, disagree, collude, be right, take offence, apologise, make amends, avoid each other, and seek each other’s company again.

Fifteen birds in five firtrees, their feathers were fanned in a fiery breeze! But, funny little birds, they had no wings! O what shall we do with the funny little things? Roast 'em alive, or stew them in a pot; fry them, boil them and eat them hot?

Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would not take the garbage out! She'd scour the pots and scrape the pans, Candy the yams and spice the hams, And though her daddy would scream and shout, She simply would not take the garbage out. And so it piled up to the ceilings: Coffee grounds, potato peelings, Brown bananas, rotten peas, Chunks of sour cottage cheese. It filled the can, it covered the floor, It cracked the window and blocked the door With bacon rinds and chicken bones, Drippy ends of ice cream cones, Prune pits, peach pits, orange peel, Gloppy glumps of cold oatmeal, Pizza crusts and withered greens, Soggy beans and tangerines, Crusts of black burned buttered toast, Gristly bits of beefy roasts. . . The garbage rolled on down the hall, It raised the roof, it broke the wall. . . Greasy napkins, cookie crumbs, Globs of gooey bubble gum, Cellophane from green baloney, Rubbery blubbery macaroni, Peanut butter, caked and dry, Curdled milk and crusts of pie, Moldy melons, dried-up mustard, Eggshells mixed with lemon custard, Cold french fried and rancid meat, Yellow lumps of Cream of Wheat. At last the garbage reached so high That it finally touched the sky. And all the neighbors moved away, And none of her friends would come to play. And finally Sarah Cynthia Stout said, "OK, I'll take the garbage out!" But then, of course, it was too late. . . The garbage reached across the state, From New York to the Golden Gate. And there, in the garbage she did hate, Poor Sarah met an awful fate, That I cannot now relate Because the hour is much too late. But children, remember Sarah Stout And always take the garbage out!

The farmer was and remains the stumbling block to socialist experiments everywhere. Since he raises his own food and tends to live in his own house, he is less “controllable” than say, the urban dweller.

Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, hollow be thy promises and shallow be thy shame. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. On a scale from on to ten, our Lord is totally eleven. Give us this day our daily bread, toasted close to dawn, and forgive us our trespasses as we shoot those who trespass on our lawn, and lead us not into temptation, such as pot or porno, but deliver us from evil (if not delivery, then DiGiorno).

Who is secure in all his basic needs? Who has work, spiritual care, medical care, housing, food, occasional entertainment, free clothing, free burial, free everything? The answer might be nuns and monks, but the standard reply is 'prisoners'.

Nu te cunosc, nu ştiu cine eşti, nu ştiu ce faci. Nu pot avea secrete faţă de dumneata. N-am spus asta la nimeni, dar d-tale ţi-o pot spune: totul depinde de Timp. Dacă nu rezolvi problema asta chiar acum, cât eşti tânără, te prinde viaţa şi te macină pe dinlăuntru, şi într-o zi te trezeşti bătrână, iar în ziua următoare te trezeşti pe patul de moarte, şi atunci e prea târziu ca să mai încerci ceva. Trebuie să cauţi asta acum, cât eşti tânără. Asta e o problemă de tinereţe... Ce trebuie să caut? îl întrebase Ileana. Să scapi de Timp. Să ieşi din Timp. Priveşte bine în jurul d-tale: ţi se fac din toate părţile semne, încrede-te în semne. Urmăreşte-le...

Time and again, racist ideas have not been cooked up from the boiling pot of ignorance and hate. Time and again, powerful and brilliant men and women have produced racist ideas in order to justify the racist policies of their era, in order to redirect the blame for their era’s racial disparities away from those policies and onto Black people.

Confidence is just entitlement. Entitlement has gotten a bad rap because it's used almost exclusively for the useless children of the rich, reality TV stars, and Conrad Hilton Jr., who gets kicked off an airplane for smoking pot in the lavatory and calling people peasants or whatever. But entitlement in and of itself isn't so bad. Entitlement is simply the belief that you deserve something. Which is great. The hard part is, you'd better make sure you deserve it.

I walked up to Griz and poked him in the chest. "Let me make this perfectly clear to you. Though some might seek to make it appear otherwise, I am not a bride to be bartered away to another kingdom, not a prize of war, not a mouthpiece for your Komizar. I am not a chip in a card game to be mindlessly tossed into the center of the pot, nor one to be kept in the tight fist of a greedy opponent. I am a player seated at the table alongside everyone else, and from this day forward, I will play my own hand as I see fit. Do you understand me? Because the consequences could be ugly if someone thought otherwise.

If America is a melting-pot, then to me India is a thali, a selection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each tastes different, and does not necessarily mix with the next, but they belong together on the same plate, and they complement each other in making the meal a satisfying repast.

I am convinced that men hate each other because they fear each other. They fear each other because they don’t know each other, and they don’t know each other because they don’t communicate with each other, and they don’t communicate with each other because they are separated from each other

London is a melting pot of diverse cultures, which makes it fertile soil for an eclectic art, music, and culture scene. London keeps a firm grip on its history and origins, which is evident in the way the locals dress.

Before a Cat will condescend To treat you as a trusted friend, Some little token of esteem Is needed, like a dish of cream; And you might now and then supply Some caviare, or Strassburg Pie, Some potted grouse, or salmon paste — He's sure to have his personal taste. (I know a Cat, who makes a habit Of eating nothing else but rabbit, And when he's finished, licks his paws So's not to waste the onion sauce.) A Cat's entitled to expect These evidences of respect. And so in time you reach your aim, And finally call him by his name.

That should have made him an anxious, stewing pot of nerves. Instead he tipped his head back, sun warm on his skin, and acknowledged that while he didn’t feel great, someday he would feel great again. For today, that was enough.

LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest. Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds. Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look. The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Grilled satyr with mango chutney," Polyphemus mused. He looked back at Clarisse, still hanging over the pot of boiling water. "You a satyr too?" "No, you overgrown pile of dung!" she yelled. "I'm a girl! The daughter of Ares!Now untie me so i can rip your arms off!" "Rip my arms off," Polyphemus repeated. "And stuff them down your throat!" "You got spunk.

to me a mountain is a buddha. think of the patience, hundreds of thousands of years just sittin there bein perfectly perfectly silent and like praying for all living creatures in that silence and just waitin for us to stop all our frettin and foolin." japhy got out the tea, chinese tea, and sprinkled some in the tin pot, and had the fire going meanwhile...and pretty soon the water was boiling and he poured it out steaming into the tin pot and we had cups of tea with our tin cups... "remember that book i told you about the first sip is joy and the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy.

Ravel said. “And I order people around really well. This morning, Tipstaff came over with a cup of tea and I told him no, I don’t want tea I want coffee. That was great. I really asserted my authority.” “Did he go and get you a coffee?” “No, he said he’d already made a pot of tea so I took the tea because, you know he’d already made it, but my authority was still firmly asserted.” Ghastly nodded. “He’ll think twice about making tea again.” “That he will, Ghastly my friend, that he will. What are we looking for, by the way? “Seriously? I gave you the file half an hour ago.” “Yes, you did.” “And did you read it?” “No, I did not.

Oh,' the priest said, 'that's another thing altogether - God is love. I don't say the heart doesn't feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn't recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us - God's love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn't it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around.

It hurt so bad waiting for you, Lily. I thought I would lose my mind. No amount of liquor, women or pot drove you from my mind. I would ride on my bike all the way to your dorm and sit outside just to watch you go to classes in the morning, then drive home and start the whole fucking thing over again.

Though there had been moments of beauty in it Mariam knew that life for most part had been unkind to her. But as she walked the final twenty paces, she could not help but wish for more of it. She wished she could see Laila again, wished to hear the clangor of her laugh, to sit with her once more for a pot of chai and leftover halwa under a starlit sky. She mourned that she would never see Aziza grow up, would not see the beautiful young woman that she would one day become, would not get to paint her hands with henna and toss noqul candy at her wedding. She would never play with Aziza's children. She would have liked that very much , to be old and play with Aziza's children. Mariam wished for so much in those final moments. Yet as she closed her eyes, it was not regret any longer but a sensation of abundant peace that washed over her. She thought of her entry into this world, the harami child of a lowly villager, an unintended thing, a pitiable, regrettable accident. A weed. And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence at last. No. It was not so bad , Mariam thought, that she should die this way. Not so bad. This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate beginnings.

You need to be clever to best him. Are you clever, Rachel?” Oh God. She wants to know if I’m clever. I glanced at Al, and he stared at me, then shrugged. Licking my lips, I said, “It’s the shiny pot that puts a hole in the sky.” Al’s mouth dropped open, but Newt thought about it, her expression thoughtful and her fingers finally leaving her knife. “Very true,” she said as she eased back into the cushions. With a soft click of his teeth, Al’s mouth shut. His eyes were cross, and he seemed peeved that I’d found a way to satisfy her without compromising myself at all.

I elbowed my way into the grubby café, bought a pie that tasted of shoe polish and a pot of tea with cork crumbs floating in it, and eavesdropped on a pair of Shetland pony breeders. Despondency makes one hanker after lives one never led. Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don't, will is pitted against will. "Admire me, for I am a metaphor.

You hear even a hint that a blizzard’s coming, Roxanne Giselle, you go straight to the store and buy toilet paper, you hear me? And make a pot of chili or stew. Don’t get caught out. I don’t want a phone call saying you starved to death, stuck in the house with no stew.

This person is now lost to her for ever. She is someone adrift in her life, who doesn’t recognise it. She is unmoored, at a loss. She is someone who weeps if she cannot find a shoe or overboils the soup or trips over a pot. Small things undo her. Nothing is certain any more.

She craves men but women are her most abiding lovers. Her friends are her soul mates, all the love without the consumption of sex and romance, a different kind of intimacy. Women make love by admiring each other, studying and envying each other and mixing it all up in a pot of devotion.

A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.

Be conscious of your decisions. More importantly, take responsibility for the consequences they bring. When struggling with your passions and goals, be patient and never bail out! You'll eventually get your shot. Remember that only the strong will survive. Be willing to sacrifice things you love to acheive your dream. Expect disappointments, because they will happen over and over again. Just never forget that there is definitely a pot of gold at the end of that rainbow- it's just a son of a bitch getting there!

Children being children, however, the grotesque Hopping Pot had taken hold of their imaginations. The solution was to jettison the pro-Muggle moral but keep the warty cauldron, so by the middle of the sixteenth century a different version of the tale was in wide circulation among wizarding families. In the revised story, the Hopping Pot protects an innocent wizard from his torch-bearing, pitchfork-toting neighbours by chasing them away from the wizard's cottage, catching them and swallowing them whole.

Aw, fudge,' floated down to me, as a couple of golden eyes peered over a third-floor window ledge. 'You're a freaking dhampir. Why are you reading Tolkien?' I shrugged, then had to dodge the potted geranium he threw at me. 'After five hundred years, you've read just about everything. Besides, he had hella world-building skills.

There is no such thing as a person. There are only restrictions and limitations. The sum total of these defines the person. You think you know yourself when you know what you are. But you never know who you are. The person merely appears to be, like the space within the pot appears to have the shape and volume and smell of the pot. See that you are not what you believe yourself to be. Fight with all the strength at your disposal against the idea that you are nameable and describable. You are not. Refuse to think of yourself in terms of this or that. There is no other way out of misery, which you have created for yourself through blind acceptance without investigation. Suffering is a call for enquiry, all pain needs investigation. Don’t be too lazy to think.

To me, the poor are like Bonsai trees. When you plant the best seed of the tallest tree in a six-inch deep flower pot, you get a perfect replica of the tallest tree, but it is only inches tall. There is nothing wrong with the seed you planted; only the soil-base you provided was inadequate. Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong with their seeds. Only society never gave them a base to grow on.

When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act like a prism and form a rainbow. The rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colors. These take the shape of a long round arch, with it’s path high above, and it’s two ends apparently beyond the horizon. There is, according to legend, a boiling pot of a gold at one end. People look, but no one ever finds it. When a man looks for something beyond his reach, his friends say he is looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

The most important thing we've learned, So far as children are concerned, Is never, NEVER, NEVER let Them near your television set -- Or better still, just don't install The idiotic thing at all. In almost every house we've been, We've watched them gaping at the screen. They loll and slop and lounge about, And stare until their eyes pop out. (Last week in someone's place we saw A dozen eyeballs on the floor.) They sit and stare and stare and sit Until they're hypnotised by it, Until they're absolutely drunk With all that shocking ghastly junk. Oh yes, we know it keeps them still, They don't climb out the window sill, They never fight or kick or punch, They leave you free to cook the lunch And wash the dishes in the sink -- But did you ever stop to think, To wonder just exactly what This does to your beloved tot? IT ROTS THE SENSE IN THE HEAD! IT KILLS IMAGINATION DEAD! IT CLOGS AND CLUTTERS UP THE MIND! IT MAKES A CHILD SO DULL AND BLIND HE CAN NO LONGER UNDERSTAND A FANTASY, A FAIRYLAND! HIS BRAIN BECOMES AS SOFT AS CHEESE! HIS POWERS OF THINKING RUST AND FREEZE! HE CANNOT THINK -- HE ONLY SEES! 'All right!' you'll cry. 'All right!' you'll say, 'But if we take the set away, What shall we do to entertain Our darling children? Please explain!' We'll answer this by asking you, 'What used the darling ones to do? 'How used they keep themselves contented Before this monster was invented?' Have you forgotten? Don't you know? We'll say it very loud and slow: THEY ... USED ... TO ... READ! They'd READ and READ, AND READ and READ, and then proceed To READ some more. Great Scott! Gadzooks! One half their lives was reading books! The nursery shelves held books galore! Books cluttered up the nursery floor! And in the bedroom, by the bed, More books were waiting to be read! Such wondrous, fine, fantastic tales Of dragons, gypsies, queens, and whales And treasure isles, and distant shores Where smugglers rowed with muffled oars, And pirates wearing purple pants, And sailing ships and elephants, And cannibals crouching 'round the pot, Stirring away at something hot. (It smells so good, what can it be? Good gracious, it's Penelope.) The younger ones had Beatrix Potter With Mr. Tod, the dirty rotter, And Squirrel Nutkin, Pigling Bland, And Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and- Just How The Camel Got His Hump, And How the Monkey Lost His Rump, And Mr. Toad, and bless my soul, There's Mr. Rat and Mr. Mole- Oh, books, what books they used to know, Those children living long ago! So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, Go throw your TV set away, And in its place you can install A lovely bookshelf on the wall. Then fill the shelves with lots of books, Ignoring all the dirty looks, The screams and yells, the bites and kicks, And children hitting you with sticks- Fear not, because we promise you That, in about a week or two Of having nothing else to do, They'll now begin to feel the need Of having something to read. And once they start -- oh boy, oh boy! You watch the slowly growing joy That fills their hearts. They'll grow so keen They'll wonder what they'd ever seen In that ridiculous machine, That nauseating, foul, unclean, Repulsive television screen! And later, each and every kid Will love you more for what you did.

As well, they used their B-52 bombers to drop thousands of tons of bombs which included napalm and cluster bombs. In a particularly vile attack, they used poisonous chemicals on our base regions of Xuyen Moc, the Minh Dam and the Nui Thi Vai mountains. They sprayed their defoliants over jungle, and productive farmland alike. They even bull-dozed bare, both sides along the communication routes and more than a kilometre into the jungle adjacent to our base areas. This caused the Ba Ria-Long Khanh Province Unit to send out a directive to D445 and D440 Battalions that as of 01/November/1969, the rations of both battalions would be set at 27 litres of rice per man per month when on operations. And 25 litres when in base or training. So it was that as the American forces withdrew, their arms and lavish base facilities were transferred across to the RVN. The the forces of the South Vietnamese Government were with thereby more resources but this also created any severe maintenance, logistic and training problems. The Australian Army felt that a complete Australian withdrawal was desirable with the departure of the Task Force (1ATF), but the conservative government of Australia thought that there were political advantages in keeping a small force in south Vietnam. Before his election, in 1964, Johnston used a line which promised peace, but also had a policy of war. The very same tactic was used by Nixon. Nixon had as early as 1950 called for direction intervention by American Forces which were to be on the side of the French colonialists. The defoliants were sprayed upon several millions of hectares, and it can best be described as virtual biocide. According to the figure from the Americans themselves, between the years of 1965 to 1973, ten million Vietnamese people were forced to leave their villages ad move to cities because of what the Americans and their allies had done. The Americans intensified the bombing of whole regions of Laos which were controlled by Lao patriotic forces. They used up to six hundred sorties per day with many types of aircraft including B52s. On 07/January/1979, the Vietnamese Army using Russian built T-54 and T-59 tanks, assisted by some Cambodian patriots liberated Phnom Penh while the Pol Pot Government and its agencies fled into the jungle. A new government under Hun Sen was installed and the Khmer Rouge’s navy was sunk nine days later in a battle with the Vietnamese Navy which resulted in twenty-two Kampuchean ships being sunk.

So, in "Melting Pot" the children (about a third of whom were kids of color) sang the line, "America was the new world and Europe was the old," in one stroke eradicating the narratives of indigenous persons for whom America was hardly new, and any nonwhite kids whose old worlds had been in Africa or Asia, not Europe.

If you choose to believe me, good. Now I will tell you how Octavia, the spider-web city, is made. There is a precipice between two steep mountains: the city is over the void, bound to the two crests with ropes and chains and catwalks. You walk on the little wooden ties, careful not to set your foot in the open spaces, or you cling to the hempen strands. Below there is nothing for hundreds and hundreds of feet: a few clouds glide past; farther down you can glimpse the chasm's bed. This is the foundation of the city: a net which serves as passage and as support. All the rest, instead of rising up, is hung below: rope ladders, hammocks, houses made like sacks, clothes hangers, terraces like gondolas, skins of water, gas jets, spits, baskets on strings, dumb-waiters, showers, trapezes and rings for children's games, cable cars, chandeliers, pots with trailing plants. Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia's inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will only last so long.

Alice wondered if no one ever felt as old as they were because it happened so slowly, and you were only ever one day slower and creakier, and the world changed so gradually that by the time cars had evolved from boxy to smooth, or green taxis had joined yellow ones, or MetroCards had replaced tokens, you were used to it. Everyone was a lobster in the pot.

[Greens] don't come through the back door the same as other groceries. They don't cower at the bottom of paper bags marked 'Liberty.' They wave over the top. They don't stop to be checked off the receipt. They spill out onto the counter. No going onto shelves with cans in orderly lines like school children waiting for recess. No waiting, sometimes for years beyond the blue sell by date, to be picked up and taken from the shelf. Greens don't stack or stand at attention. They aren't peas to be pushed around. Cans can't contain them. Boxed in they would burst free. Greens are wild. Plunging them into a pot took some doing. Only lobsters fight more. Either way, you have to use your hands. Then, retrieving them requires the longest of my mother's wooden spoons, the one with the burnt end. Swept onto a plate like the seaweed after a storm, greens sit tall, dark, and proud.

Because I'm pretty sure we conceived this child the night I ate that pot cookie. I'm eighty-four percent positive our child is going to be born a pot head. It's going to come out with dreadlocks and wearing a Bob Marley onesie. Its first word will probably be 'Whaaaaaazzzzzzzuuuuuup'. It's never, ever going to sleep through the night because it's always going to have the munchies.

All political movements are basically anti-creative — since a political movement is a form of war. “There’s no place for impractical dreamers around here,” that’s what they always say. “Your writing activities will be directed, kindly stop horsing around.” “As for the smoking of marijuana, it is the exploitation for the workers.” Both favor alcohol and are against pot.

You want waffles?” I tried to keep the skepticism from my voice. “No firstborn or a pot of gold?” “I’m not a leprechaun, Sam. And what would I do with a baby?” Her eyebrow shot back up, and she crossed her arms. “I want waffles. Take it or leave it.” I glanced at Brid, who was staring at Ashley shrewdly. “Let’s talk numbers,” she said. “Are we talking, like, twenty waffles all at once? Or a waffle a week for six months? What?” “Every day for two years,” Ashley said. “That’s outrageous,” Brid sputtered.

Friendship is indispensable to man for the proper function of his memory. Remembering our past, carrying it with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn't shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends. They are our mirror; our memory; we ask nothing of them but that they polish the mirror from time to time so we can look at ourselves in it.

Miss Celia stares down into the pot like she's looking for her future. "Are you happy, Minny?" "Why you ask me funny questions like that?" "But are you?" "Course I's happy. You happy too. Big house, big yard, husband looking after you." I frown at Miss Celia and I make sure she can see it. Because ain't that white people for you, wondering if they are happy ENOUGH.

Because lascivious or venal lips had murmured the same words to him, he now had little belief in their sincerity when he heard them from Emma; they should be taken with a grain of salt, he thought, because the most exaggerated speeches usually hid the weakest feelings - as though the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow into the emptiest phrases, since no one can ever express the exact measure of his needs, his conceptions, or his sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked pot on which we beat out rhythms for bears to dance to when we are striving to make music that will wring tears from the stars.

And give me some coffee. Black as midnight on a moonless night." Harga looked surprised. That wasn't like Vimes. "How black's that, then?" he said. "Oh, pretty damn black, I should think." "Not necessarily." "What?" "You get more stars on a moonless night. Stands to reason. They show up more. It can be quite bright on a moonless night." Vimes sighed. "An overcast moonless night?" he said. Harga looked carefully at his coffee pot. "Cumulus or cirro-nimbus?" "I'm sorry? What did you say?" "You get city lights reflected off cumulus, because it's low lying, see. Mind you, you can get high-altitude scatter off the ice crystals in--" "A moonless night," said Vimes, in a hollow voice, "that is as black as coffee.

In fact, the only things in the flat Crowley devoted any personal attention to were the houseplants. They were huge, and green, and glorious, with shiny, healthy, lustrous leaves. This was because, once a week, Crowley went around the flat with a green plastic plant mister spraying the leaves, and talking to the plants.... Although talking is perhaps the wrong word for what Crowley did. What he did was put the fear of God into them. More precisely, the fear of Crowley. In addition to which, every couple of months Crowley would pick out a plant that was growing too slowly, or succumbing to leaf-wilt, or browning, or just didn't look quite as good as the others, and he would carry it around to all the plants. "Say goodbye to your friend," he'd say to them. "He just couldn't cut it..." Then he would leave the flat with the offending plant, and return an hour or so later with a large empty flower pot, which he would leave somewhere conspicuously around the flat. The plants were the most luxurious, verdant, and beautiful in London. Also the most terrified.

Oamenii sunt de două feluri, unii sunt asemeni unor oglinzi, dacă îţi reflecţi iubirea în ei, o vei primi înapoi. Exact cum faci tu când te priveşti în oglindă, îi oferi o imagine şi ea te răsplăteşte cu alta la fel. Sunt însă şi oameni care nu pot oglindi, e ca şi cum ai încerca să-ţi priveşti chipul în perete. Poţi sta acolo mult şi bine, nu-ţi va oferi nimic. Doar dacă vor dori, se vor putea transforma în oglinzi.

Eventually the Woodsman spoke. ‘We all have our routines,’ he said softly. ‘But they must have a purpose and provide an outcome that we can see and take some comfort from, or else they have no use at all. Without that, they are like the endless pacings of a caged animal. If they are not madness itself, then they are a prelude to it.’ The Woodsman stood and showed David his axe. ‘See here,’ he said, pointing with his finger at the blade. Every morning, I make certain that me axe is clean and keen. I look to my house and check that its windows and doors remain secure. I tend to my land, disposing of weeds and ensuring that the soil is watered. I walk through the forest, clearing those paths that need to be kept open. Where trees have been damaged, I do my best to repair what has been harmed. these are my routines and I enjoy doing them well.’ He laid a hand gently on David’s shoulder, and David saw understanding in his face. ‘Rules and routines are good, but they must give you satisfaction. Can you truly say you gain that from touching and counting?’ David shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘but I get scared when I don’t do them. I’m afraid of what might happen.’ ‘Then find routines that allow you to feel secure when they are done. You told me that you have a new brother: look to him each morning. Look to your father, and your stepmother. Tend to the flowers in the garden, or in the pots upon the window sill. Seek others who are weaker than you are, and try to give them comfort where you can. Let these be your routines, and the rules that govern your life.

THE ONE THING YOU MUST DO There is one thing in this world you must never forget to do. If you forget everything else and not this, there's nothing to worry about, but if you remember everything else and forget this, then you will have done nothing in your life. It's as if a king has sent you to some country to do a task, and you perform a hundred other services, but not the one he sent you to do. So human being come to this world to do particular work. That work is the purpose, and each is specific to the person. If you don't do it, it's as though a priceless Indian sword were used to slice rotten meat. It's a golden bowl being used to cook turnips, when one filing from the bowl could buy a hundred suitable pots. It's like a knife of the finest tempering nailed into a wall to hang things on. You say, "But look, I'm using the dagger. It's not lying idle." Do you hear how ludicrous that sounds? For a penny an iron nail could be bought to serve for that. You say, "But I spend my energies on lofty enterprises. I study jurisprudence and philosophy and logic and astronomy and medicine and the rest." But consider why you do those things. They are all branches of yourself. Remember the deep root of your being, the presence of your lord. Give yourself to the one who already owns your breath and your moments. If you don't, you will be like the man who takes a precious dagger and hammers it into his kitchen wall for a peg to hold his dipper gourd. You'll be wasting valuable keenness and forgetting your dignity and purpose.

Come live with me and be my love And we will all the pleasures prove Of a marriage conducted with economy In the Twentieth Century Anno Donomy. We’ll live in a dear little walk-up flat With practically room to swing a cat And a potted cactus to give it hauteur And a bathtub equipped with dark brown water. We’ll eat, without undue discouragement, Foods low in cost but high in nouragement And quaff with pleasure, while chatting wittily, The peculiar wine of Little Italy. We’ll remind each other it’s smart to be thrifty And buy our clothes for something-fifty. We’ll bus for miles on holidays For seas at depressing matinees, And every Sunday we’ll have a lark And take a walk in Central Park. And one of these days not too remote You’ll probably up and cut my throat.

It’s a widely known fact that most moms are ready to kill someone by eight thirty A.M. on any given morning. On the particular morning of Tuesday, October eighth, I was ready by seven forty-five. If you’ve never had to wrestle a two-year-old slathered in maple syrup into a diaper while your four-year-old decides to give herself a haircut in time for preschool, all while trying to track down the whereabouts of your missing nanny as you sop up coffee grounds from an overflowing pot because in your sleep-deprived fog you forgot to put in the filter, let me spell it out for you. I was ready to kill someone. I didn’t really care who.

What—?” In one movement, Thorne lifted her onto the desk and pressed her back against an enormous potted fern and—oh. Cress had built a thousand fantasies around their rooftop kiss, but this kiss was something new. Where before, the kiss had been gentle and protective, now there was something passionate. Determined. Cress’s body dissolved into nothing but sensation. His hands burned her waist through the skirt’s thin fabric. Her knees pressed against his hips, and he pulled her closer, closer, like he couldn’t get her close enough. A whimper escaped her mouth, only to be swallowed by his. She heard a moan, but it could have come from either of them.

In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots. The stench of sulfur rose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries, and from the slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood. People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease. The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank, it stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces.The peasant stank as did the priest, the apprentice as did his master’s wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the king himself stank, stank like a rank lion, and the queen like an old goat, summer and winter

Nu mă interesează un bărbat decât în măsura în care cred că-l stăpânesc ca femeie, în care cred că sunt pentru el, într-un moment din viaţă, o fiinţă unică, de neînlocuit. Ştiu că sunt femei mai frumoase decât mine, dar asta nu are nicio însemnătate, fiindcă oricât de frumoasă ar fi o femeie, se poate totdeauna ivi alta, care să fie şi mai frumoasă. Dar cred că poate exista o adâncime sufletească, o sensibilitate, o inteligenţă care pot însufleţi în aşa fel un anumit fizic, care pot crea o feminitate infungibilă(cum se spune în Drept despre bunurile care nu se pot schimba între ele, cum ar fi un tablou, un covor, un exemplar de carte dintr-o ediţie rară), amalgam unic de însuşiri de neînlocuit, cel puţin într-o clipă dată, pentru un om într-un anume climat sufletesc

CONSORTING WITH ANGELS I was tired of being a woman, tired of the spoons and the pots, tired of my mouth and my breasts, tired of the cosmetics and the silks. There were still men who sat at my table, circled around the bowl I offered up. The bowl was filled with purple grapes and the flies hovered in for the scent and even my father came with his white bone. But I was tired of the gender of things. Last night I had a dream and I said to it . . . "You are the answer. You will outlive my husband and my father." In that dream there was a city made of chains where Joan was put to death in man's clothes and the nature of the angels went unexplained, no two made in the same species, one with a nose, one with an ear in its hand, one chewing a star and recording its orbit, each one like a poem obeying itself, performing God's functions, a people apart. "You are the answer," I said, and entered, lying down on the gates of the city. Then the chains were fastened around me and I lost my common gender and my final aspect. Adam was on the left of me and Eve was on the right of me, both thoroughly inconsistent with the world of reason. We wove our arms together and rode under the sun. I was not a woman anymore, not one thing or the other. 0 daughters of Jerusalem, the king has brought me into his chamber. I am black and I am beautiful. I've been opened and undressed. I have no arms or legs. I'm all one skin like a fish. I'm no more a woman than Christ was a man.

Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it is beautiful but because it is his. If it were his beauty that enthralled him, he would be set free in a few years by its fading. "After all," sighed Narcissus the hunchback, "on me it looks good. The contemplation of his reflection does not turn Narcissus into Priapus: the spell in which he is trapped is not a desire for himself but the satisfaction of not desiring the nymphs. "I prefer my pistol to my p…," said Narcissus; "it cannot take aim without my permission" – and took a pot shot at Echo.

I believe that the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms on the grasslands of Africa gave us the model for all religions to follow. And when, after long centuries of slow forgetting, migration, and climatic change, the knowledge of the mystery was finally lost, we in our anguish traded partnership for dominance, traded harmony with nature for rape of nature, traded poetry for the sophistry of science. In short, we traded our birthright as partners in the drama of the living mind of the planet for the broken pot shards of history, warfare, neurosis, and-if we do not quickly awaken to our predicament-planetary catastrophe.

THE ONE THING YOU MUST DO There is one thing in this world you must never forget to do. If you forget everything else and not this, there's nothing to worry about, but if you remember everything else and forget this, then you will have done nothing in your life. It's as if a king has sent you to some country to do a task, and you perform a hundred other services, but not the one he sent you to do. So human being come to this world to do particular work. That work is the purpose, and each is specific to the person. If you don't do it, it's as though a priceless Indian sword were used to slice rotten meat. It's a golden bowl being used to cook turnips, when one filing from the bowl could buy a hundred suitable pots. It's like a knife of the finest tempering nailed into a wall to hang things on. You say, "But look, I'm using the dagger. It's not lying idle." Do you hear how ludicrous that sounds? For a penny an iron nail could be bought to serve for that. You say, "But I spend my energies on lofty enterprises. I study jurisprudence and philosophy and logic and astronomy and medicine and the rest." But consider why you do those things. They are all branches of yourself. Remember the deep root of your being, the presence of your lord. Give yourself to the one who already owns your breath and your moments. If you don't, you will be like the man who takes a precious dagger and hammers it into his kitchen wall for a peg to hold his dipper gourd. You'll be wasting valuable keenness and forgetting your dignity and purpose.

The Western States nervous under the beginning change. Texas and Oklahoma, Kansas and Arkansas, New Mexico, Arizona, California. A single family moved from the land. Pa borrowed money from the bank, and now the bank wants the land. The land company--that's the bank when it has land --wants tractors, not families on the land. Is a tractor bad? Is the power that turns the long furrows wrong? If this tractor were ours it would be good--not mine, but ours. If our tractor turned the long furrows of our land, it would be good. Not my land, but ours. We could love that tractor then as we have loved this land when it was ours. But the tractor does two things--it turns the land and turns us off the land. There is little difference between this tractor and a tank. The people are driven, intimidated, hurt by both. We must think about this. One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty car creaking along the highway to the west. I lost my land, a single tractor took my land. I am alone and bewildered. And in the night one family camps in a ditch and another family pulls in and the tents come out. The two men squat on their hams and the women and children listen. Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlarge of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here "I lost my land" is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate--"We lost our land." The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one. And from this first "we" there grows a still more dangerous thing: "I have a little food" plus "I have none." If from this problem the sum is "We have a little food," the thing is on its way, the movement has direction. Only a little multiplication now, and this land, this tractor are ours. The two men squatting in a ditch, the little fire, the side- meat stewing in a single pot, the silent, stone-eyed women; behind, the children listening with their souls to words their minds do not understand. The night draws down. The baby has a cold. Here, take this blanket. It's wool. It was my mother's blanket--take it for the baby. This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning--from "I" to "we." If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we." The Western States are nervous under the begining change. Need is the stimulus to concept, concept to action. A half-million people moving over the country; a million more restive, ready to move; ten million more feeling the first nervousness. And tractors turning the multiple furrows in the vacant land.

In fact, there is absolutely nothing healthy in your house. And you thought you were eating healthily this whole time. Every food and drink item in your pantry and refrigerator has been slowly killing you. General supermarkets aren’t much different—over ninety-five percent of the food and drinks neatly stacked on shelves are slowly killing humans. Just like your water supply we’ve poisoned, we’ve made sure the places you go to purchase food are overflowing with poison for you to freely ingest. But we don’t force you to eat poisonous food, you choose to eat it yourselves. Most of the poisons are shown right on the food or drinks’ ingredient list for you to peruse through.” “Yeah, right. Like I can understand half of the words on those ingredient lists.” Karver laughed while filling a pot full of fluoride tap water and putting it on a burner to boil. “It’s pretty simple. If you don’t understand what an ingredient is, you shouldn’t be putting it in your body. Natural flavors …” Karver laughed.

You see, the future is a kind of stew, a soup, a vichyssoise of the present and the past. That's how you get the future: You mix up everything you did today with everything you did yesterday and all the days before and everything everyone you ever met did and anyone they ever met, too. And salt and lizard and pearl and umbrellas and typewriters and a lot of other things I'm not at liberty to tell you, because I took vows, and a witch's vows have teeth. Magic is funny like that. It's not a linear thinker. The point is if you mash it all up together and you have a big enough pot and you're very good at witchcraft, you can wind up with a cauldron full of tomorrow.

Nearly a Valediction" You happened to me. I was happened to like an abandoned building by a bull- dozer, like the van that missed my skull happened a two-inch gash across my chin. You were as deep down as I’ve ever been. You were inside me like my pulse. A new- born flailing toward maternal heartbeat through the shock of cold and glare: when you were gone, swaddled in strange air I was that alone again, inventing life left after you. I don’t want to remember you as that four o’clock in the morning eight months long after you happened to me like a wrong number at midnight that blew up the phone bill to an astronomical unknown quantity in a foreign currency. The U.S. dollar dived since you happened to me. You’ve grown into your skin since then; you’ve grown into the space you measure with someone you can love back without a caveat. While I love somebody I learn to live with through the downpulled winter days’ routine wakings and sleepings, half-and-half caffeine- assisted mornings, laundry, stock-pots, dust- balls in the hallway, lists instead of longing, trust that what comes next comes after what came first. She’ll never be a story I make up. You were the one I didn’t know where to stop. If I had blamed you, now I could forgive you, but what made my cold hand, back in prox- imity to your hair, your mouth, your mind, want where it no way ought to be, defined by where it was, and was and was until the whole globed swelling liquefied and spilled through one cheek’s nap, a syllable, a tear, was never blame, whatever I wished it were. You were the weather in my neighborhood. You were the epic in the episode. You were the year poised on the equinox.

„Mă gândesc că există, la periferia lumii, oameni umili, care n-au avut șansa să găsească vreun leac, să cerceteze bacili și gene la microscop, care n-au militat pentru pace în Agora veche și n-au participat niciodată la Marele Marș (pomenit de Milan Kundera într-un roman cunoscut) și nu pot să nu mă întreb: oare acești smeriți nu au dreptul la sens? Sensul e pentru toți sau pentru nimeni. Iată, am un prieten tânăr, a făcut un cancer, vorbește de sfârșit cu o seninătate care mă uluiește, scrie poezii emoționante, ia moartea în râs, ceea ce eu nu pot să fac. Unde e sensul și binele în viața lui? Să nu-mi răspundeți că o Instanță obscură îl pune la încercare, că suferința lui concretă de zi cu zi are sens, că e o ipostază a lui Iov. Iov nu trebuie clonat”.

The tavern keeper, a wiry man with a sharp-nosed face, round, prominent ears and a receding hairline that combined to give him a rodentlike look, glanced at him, absentmindedly wiping a tankard with a grubby cloth. Will raised an eyebrow as he looked at it. He'd be willing to bet the cloth was transferring more dirt to the tankard then it was removing. "Drink?" the tavern keeper asked. He set the tankard down on the bar, as if in preparation for filling it with whatever the stranger might order. "Not out of that," Will said evenly, jerking a thumb at the tankard. Ratface shrugged, shoved it aside and produced another from a rack above the bar. "Suit yourself. Ale or ouisgeah?" Ousigeah, Will knew, was the strong malt spirit they distilled and drank in Hibernia. In a tavern like this, it might be more suitable for stripping runt than drinking. "I'd like coffee," he said, noticing the battered pot by the fire at one end of the bar. "I've got ale or ouisgeah. Take your pick." Ratface was becoming more peremptory. Will gestured toward the coffeepot. The tavern keeper shook his head. "None made," he said. "I'm not making a new pot just for you." "But he's drinking coffee," Will said, nodding to one side. Inevitably the tavern keeper glanced that way, to see who he was talking about. The moment his eyes left Will, an iron grip seized the front of his shirt collar, twisting it into a knot that choked him and at the same time dragged him forward, off balance, over the bar,. The stranger's eyes were suddenly very close. He no longer looked boyish. The eyes were dark brown, almost black in this dim light, and the tavern keeper read danger there. A lot of danger. He heard a soft whisper of steel, and glancing down past the fist that held him so tightly, he glimpsed the heavy, gleaming blade of the saxe knife as the stranger laid it on the bar between them. He looked around for possible help. But there was nobody else at the bar, and none of the customers at the tables had noticed what was going on. "Aach...mach co'hee," he choked. The tension on his collar eased and the stranger said softly, "What was that?" "I'll...make...coffee," he repeated, gasping for breath. The stranger smiled. It was a pleasant smile, but the tavern keep noticed that it never reached those dark eyes. "That's wonderful. I'll wait here.

Thou mayest rule over sin,’ Lee. That’s it. I do not believe all men are destroyed. I can name you a dozen who were not, and they are the ones the world lives by. It is true of the spirit as it is true of battles—only the winners are remembered. Surely most men are destroyed, but there are others who like pillars of fire guide frightened men through the darkness. ‘Thou mayest, Thou mayest!’ What glory! It is true that we are weak and sick and quarrelsome, but if that is all we ever were, we would, millenniums ago, have disappeared from the face of the earth. A few remnants of fossilized jawbone, some broken teeth in strata of limestone, would be the only mark man would have left of his existence in the world. But the choice, Lee, the choice of winning! I had never understood it or accepted it before. Do you see now why I told Adam tonight? I exercised the choice. Maybe I was wrong, but by telling him I also forced him to live or get off the pot. What is that word, Lee?” “Timshel,” said Lee.

You have been reading Byron. You have been marking the passages that seem to approve of your own character. I find marks against all those sentences which seem to express a sardonic yet passionate nature; a moth-like impetuosity dashing itself against hard glass. You thought, as you drew your pencil there, "I too throw off my cloak like that. I too snap my fingers in the face of destiny". Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table - it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-handkerchief. You then stuff your handkerchief back into your pocket - that is not Byron; that is you; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep.

I decided to make spaghetti for lunch again. Not that I was the least bit hungry. But I couldn't just go on sitting on the sofa, waiting for the phone to ring. I had to move my body, to begin working toward some goal. I put water in a pot, turned on the gas, and until it boiled I would make tomato sauce while listening to an FM broadcast. The radio was playing an unaccompanied violin sonata by Bach. The performance itself was excellent, but there was something annoying about it. I didn't know whether this was the fault of the violinist or of my own present state of mind, but I turned off the music and went on cooking in silence. I heated the olive oil, put garlic in the pan, and added minced onions. When these began to brown, I added the tomatoes that I had chopped and strained. It was good to be cutting things and frying things like this. It gave me a sense of accomplishment that I could feel in my hands. I liked the sounds and the smells.

...be sure to wash every day, even if it is with your own spit; don't squat down to play marbles—you are not a boy, you know; don't pick people's flowers—you might catch something; don't throw stones at blackbirds, because it might not be a blackbird at all; this is how to make a bread pudding; this is how to make doukona; this is how to make pepper pot; this is how to make a good medicine for a cold; this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child; this is how to catch a fish; this is how to throw back a fish you don't like, and that way something bad won't fall on you; this is how to bully a man; this is how a man bullies you; this is how to love a man; and if this doesn't work there are other ways, and if they don't work don't feel too bad about giving up; this is how to spit up in the air if you feel like it, and this is how to move quick so that it doesn't fall on you; this is how to make ends meet; always squeeze bread to make sure it's fresh; but what if the baker won't let me feel the bread?; you mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won't let near the bread?

He read me another poem, and another one - and he explained the true history of poetry, which is a kind of secret, a magic known only to wise men. Mr. Premier, I won't be saying anything new if I say that the history of the world is the history of a ten-thousand-year war of brains between the rich and the poor. Each side is eternally trying to hoodwink the other side: and it has been this way since the start of time. The poor win a few battles (the peeing in the potted plants, the kicking of the pet dogs, etc.) but of course the rich have won the war for ten thousand years. That's why, on day, some wise men, out of compassion for the poor, left them signs and symbols in poems, which appear to be about roses and pretty girls and things like that, but when understood correctly spill out secrets that allow the poorest man on earth to conclude the ten-thousand-year-old brain-war on terms favorable to himself.

The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work — who is thus responsible to the work… Serious interruptions to work, therefore, are never the inopportune, cheerful, even loving interruptions which come to us from another. […] It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o’clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all. There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

Tortolita, let me tell you a story,” Estevan said. “This is a South American, wild Indian story about heaven and hell.” Mrs. Parsons made a prudish face, and Estevan went on. “If you go visit hell, you will see a room like this kitchen. There is a pot of delicious stew on the table, with the most delicate aroma you can imagine. All around, people sit, like us. Only they are dying of starvation. They are jibbering and jabbering,” he looked extra hard at Mrs. Parsons, “but they cannot get a bit of this wonderful stew God has made for them. Now, why is that?” “Because they’re choking? For all eternity?” Lou Ann asked. Hell, for Lou Ann, would naturally be a place filled with sharp objects and small round foods. “No,” he said. “Good guess, but no. They are starving because they only have spoons with very long handles. As long as that.” He pointed to the mop, which I had forgotten to put away. “With these ridiculous, terrible spoons, the people in hell can reach into the pot but they cannot put the food in their mouths. Oh, how hungry they are! Oh, how they swear and curse each other!” he said, looking again at Virgie. He was enjoying this. “Now,” he went on, “you can go and visit heaven. What? You see a room just like the first one, the same table, the same pot of stew, the same spoons as long as a sponge mop. But these people are all happy and fat.” “Real fat, or do you mean just well-fed?” Lou Ann asked. “Just well-fed,” he said. “Perfectly, magnificently well-fed, and very happy. Why do you think?” He pinched up a chunk of pineapple in his chopsticks, neat as you please, and reached all the way across the table to offer it to Turtle. She took it like a newborn bird.

A qui écris-tu? -A toi. En fait, je ne t'écris pas vraiment, j'écris ce que j'ai envie de faire avec toi... Il y avait des feuilles partout. Autour d'elle, à ses pieds, sur le lit. J'en ai pris une au hasard: "...Pique-niquer, faire la sieste au bord d'une rivière, manger des pêches, des crevettes, des croissants, du riz gluant, nager, danser, m'acheter des chaussures, de la lingerie, du parfum, lire le journal, lécher les vitrines, prendre le métro, surveiller l'heure, te pousser quand tu prends toute la place, étendre le linge, aller à l'Opéra, faire des barbecues, râler parce que tu as oublié le charbon, me laver les dents en même temps que toi, t'acheter des caleçons, tondre la pelouse, lire le journal par-dessus ton épaule, t'empêcher de manger trop de cacahuètes, visiter les caves de la Loire, et celles de la Hunter Valley, faire l'idiote, jacasser, cueillir des mûres, cuisiner, jardiner, te réveiller encore parce que tu ronfles, aller au zoo, aux puces, à Paris, à Londres, te chanter des chansons, arrêter de fumer, te demander de me couper les ongles, acheter de la vaisselle, des bêtises, des choses qui ne servent à rien, manger des glaces, regarder les gens, te battre aux échecs, écouter du jazz, du reggae, danser le mambo et le cha-cha-cha, m'ennuyer, faire des caprices, bouder, rire, t'entortiller autour de mon petit doigt, chercher une maison avec vue sur les vaches, remplir d'indécents Caddie, repeindre un plafond, coudre des rideaux, rester des heures à table à discuter avec des gens intéressants, te tenir par la barbichette, te couper les cheveux, enlever les mauvaises herbes, laver la voiture, voir la mer, t'appeler encore, te dire des mots crus, apprendre à tricoter, te tricoter une écharpe, défaire cette horreur, recueillir des chats, des chiens, des perroquets, des éléphants, louer des bicyclettes, ne pas s'en servir, rester dans un hamac, boire des margaritas à l'ombre, tricher, apprendre à me servir d'un fer à repasser, jeter le fer à repasser par la fenêtre, chanter sous la pluie, fuire les touristes, m'enivrer, te dire toute la vérité, me souvenir que toute vérité n'est pas bonne à dire, t'écouter, te donner la main, récupérer mon fer à repasser, écouter les paroles des chansons, mettre le réveil, oublier nos valises, m'arrêter de courir, descendre les poubelles, te demander si tu m'aimes toujours, discuter avec la voisine, te raconter mon enfance, faire des mouillettes, des étiquettes pour les pots de confiture..." Et ça continuais comme ça pendant des pages et des pages...

Um… Eve…can I ask…?” “About what?” Eve was still frowning at the pasta like she suspected it to do something clever, like try to escape the pot. “You and Michael.” “Oh.” A surge of pink to Eve’s cheeks. Between that and the fact that she was wearing colors outside of the Goth red and black rainbow, she looked young and very cute. “Well. I don’t know if it’s – God, he’s just so–” “Hot?” Claire asked. “Hot,” Eve admitted. “Nuclear hot. Surface of the sun hot. And–” She stopped, the flush in her cheeks getting darker. Claire picked up a wooden spoon and poked the pasta, which was beginning to loosen up. “And?” “And I was planning on putting the moves on him before all this happened. That’s why I had on the garters and stuff. Planning ahead.” “Oh, wow.” “Yeah, embarrassing. Did he peek?” “When you were changing?” Claire asked. “I don’t think so. But I think he wanted to.” “That’s okay then.” Eve blinked down at the pasta, which had formed a thick white foam on top. “Is it supposed to be doing that?” Claire hadn’t ever seen it happen at her parents’ house. But then again, they hadn’t made spaghetti much. “I don’t know.” “Oh, crap!” The white foam kept growing, like in one of those cheesy science fiction movies. The foam that ate the Glass House…it mushroomed up over the top of the pot and down over the sides, and both girls yelped as it hit the burners and began to sizzle and pop. Claire grabbed the pot and moved it. Eve turned down the burner. “Right, pasta makes foam, good to know. Too hot. Way too hot.” “Who? Michael?” Claire asked, and they dissolved in giggles.

Some people read for instruction, which is praiseworthy, and some for pleasure, which is innocent, but not a few read from habit, and I suppose that is neither innocent nor praiseworthy. Of that lamentable company am I. Conversation after a time bores me, games tire me, and my own thoughts, which we are told are the unfailing resource of a sensible man, have a tendency to run dry. Then I fly to my book as the opium-seeker to his pipe. I would sooner read the catalogue of the Army and Navy stores or Bradshaw's Guide than nothing at all, and indeed I have spent many delightful hours over both these works. At one time I never went out without a second-hand bookseller's list in my pocket. I know no reading more fruity. Of course to read in this way is as reprehensible as doping, and I never cease to wonder at the impertinence of great readers who, because they are such, look down on the illiterate. From the standpoint of what eternity is it better to have read a thousand books than to have ploughed a million furrows? Let us admit that reading with us is just a drug that we cannot do without — who of this band does not know the restlessness that attacks him when he has been severed from reading too long, the apprehension and irritability, and the sigh of relief which the sight of a printed page extracts from him? — and so let us be no more vainglorious than the poor slaves of the hypodermic needle or the pint-pot. And like the dope-fiend who cannot move from place to place without taking with him a plentiful supply of his deadly balm I never venture far without a sufficiency of reading matter. Books are so necessary to me that when in a railway train I have become aware that fellow-travellers have come away without a single one I have been seized with a veritable dismay. But when I am starting on a long journey the problem is formidable.

Science works by experiments. It watches how things behave. Every scientific statement in the long run, however complicated it looks, really means something like, 'I pointed the telescope to such and such a part of the sky at 2:20 a.m. on January 15th and saw so-and-so,' or, 'I put some of this stuff in a pot and heated it to such-and-such a temperature and it did so-and-so.' Do not think I am saying anything against science: I am only saying what its job is. And the more scientific a man is, the more (I believe) he would agree with me that this is the job of science--and a very useful and necessary job it is too. But why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes--something of a different kind--this is not a scientific question. If there is 'Something Behind,' then either it will have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some different way. The statement that there is any such thing, and the statement that there is no such thing, are neither of them statements that science can make. And real scientists do not usually make them. It is usually the journalists and popular novelists who have picked up a few odds and ends of half-baked science from textbooks who go in for them. After all, it is really a matter of common sense. Supposing science ever became complete so that it knew every single thing in the whole universe. Is it not plain that the questions, 'Why is there a universe?' 'Why does it go on as it does?' 'Has it any meaning?' would remain just as they were?

I feel that for white America to understand the significance of the problem of the Negro will take a bigger and tougher America than any we have yet known. I feel that America's past is too shallow, her national character too superficially optimistic, her very morality too suffused with color hate for her to accomplish so vast and complex a task. Culturally the Negro represents a paradox: Though he is an organic part of the nation, he is excluded by the ride and direction of American culture. Frankly, it is felt to be right to exclude him, and it if felt to be wrong to admit him freely. Therefore if, within the confines of its present culture, the nation ever seeks to purge itself of its color hate, it will find itself at war with itself, convulsed by a spasm of emotional and moral confusion. If the nation ever finds itself examining its real relation to the Negro, it will find itself doing infinitely more than that; for the anti-Negro attitude of whites represents but a tiny part - though a symbolically significant one - of the moral attitude of the nation. Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness. Am I damning my native land? No; for I, too, share these faults of character! And I really do not think that America, adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe into its most fundamental beliefs.

Dear Deborah, Words do not come easily for so many men. We are taught to be strong, to provide, to put away our emotions. A father can work his way through his days and never see that his years are going by. If I could go back in time, I would say some things to that young father as he holds, somewhat uncertainly, his daughter for the very first time. These are the things I would say: When you hear the first whimper in the night, go to the nursery leaving your wife sleeping. Rock in a chair, walk the floor, sing a lullaby so that she will know a man can be gentle. When Mother is away for the evening, come home from work, do the babysitting. Learn to cook a hotdog or a pot of spaghetti, so that your daughter will know a man can serve another's needs. When she performs in school plays or dances in recitals, arrive early, sit in the front seat, devote your full attention. Clap the loudest, so that she will know a man can have eyes only for her. When she asks for a tree house, don't just build it, but build it with her. Sit high among the branches and talk about clouds, and caterpillars, and leaves. Ask her about her dreams and wait for her answers, so that she will know a man can listen. When you pass by her door as she dresses for a date, tell her she is beautiful. Take her on a date yourself. Open doors, buy flowers, look her in the eye, so that she will know a man can respect her. When she moves away from home, send a card, write a note, call on the phone. If something reminds you of her, take a minute to tell her, so that she will know a man can think of her even when she is away. Tell her you love her, so that she will know a man can say the words. If you hurt her, apologize, so that she will know a man can admit that he's wrong. These seem like such small things, such a fraction of time in the course of two lives. But a thread does not require much space. It can be too fine for the eye to see, yet, it is the very thing that binds, that takes pieces and laces them into a whole. Without it, there are tatters. It is never too late for a man to learn to stitch, to begin mending. These are the things I would tell that young father, if I could. A daughter grown up quickly. There isn't time to waste. I love you, Dad