Time. Time. What is time?

Time. Time. What is time?
The Swiss manufacture it. The French hoard it.
The Italians squander it. Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. You know what I say? I say time is a crook.

From: Beat the Devil a 1953 film directed by John Huston and co-authored by Huston and Truman Capote

— Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep)

"I don't mind your showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintace. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter nights."

As time goes by

You must remember this
A kiss is still a kiss
A sigh is still (just) a sigh
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by

And when two lovers woo
They still say: "i love you"
On that you can rely
No matter what the future brings
As time goes by

Moonlight and love songs - never out of date
Hearts full of passion - jealousy and hate
Woman needs man - and man must have his mate
That no one can deny

It’s still the same old story
A fight for love and glory
A case of do or die
The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by

I cheated myself

Meet you downstairs in the bar and heard your rolled up sleeves and your skull t-shirt You say why did you do it with him today? and sniff me out like I was Tanqueray cause you're my fella, my guy hand me your stella and fly by the time I'm out the door you tear men down like Roger Moore I cheated myself like I knew I would I told ya, I was trouble you know that I'm no good Upstairs in bed, with my ex boy, he’s in the place, but I can't get joy, thinking on you in the final throes, this is when my buzzer goes run out to meet your chips and bitter you say when we married cause you're not bitter there'll be none of him no more I cried for you on the kitchen floor I cheated myself like I knew I would I told ya, I was trouble you know that I'm no good sweet reunion, Jamaica and Spain we're like how we were again I'm in the tub, you on the seat lick your lips as I soak my feet then you notice little carpet burn my stomach drop and my guts churn you shrug and its the worst who truly stuck the knife in first I cheated myself like I knew I would I told ya I was trouble, you know that I'm no good I cheated myself, like I knew I would I told ya I was trouble, yeah ya know that I'm no good

No, No, No!

They tried to make me go to rehab but I said 'no, no, no'
Yes I've been bad but when I come back you'll know know know
I ain't got the time and if my daddy thinks I'm fine
He's tried to make me go to rehab but I won't go, go, go

I'd rather be at home with ray
I ain't got seventy days
Cuz there's nothing
There's nothing you can teach me
That I can't learn from mr hathaway

I didn't get a lot in class
But I know it don't come in a shot glass

They tried to make me go to rehab but I said 'no, no, no'
Yes I've been black but when I come back you'll know know know
I ain't got the time and if my daddy thinks I'm fine
He's tried to make me go to rehab but I won't go, go, go

The man said 'why do you think you here'
I said 'I got no idea'
'I'm gonna, I'm gonna lose my baby
So I always keep a bottle near'
He said 'I just think your depressed,
This me "Yeah, baby, and the rest"

They tried to make me go to rehab but I said 'no, no, no'
Yes I've been black but when I come back you'll know, know, know...


I don't never wanna drink again
I just ooooh I just need a friend
I'm not gonna spend ten weeks
Have everyone think I'm on the mend

It's not just my pride
It's just til these tears have dried

They tried to make me go to rehab, but I said 'no no no'
Yes I've been black, but when I come back you'll know know know
I ain't got the time and if my daddy thinks I'm fine
They tried to make me go to rehab but I won't go, go, go

Cuckoo Clock

Harry Lime: Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long Holly.

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost, 1874 - 1963

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Dorothy Parker quotations

*By the time you swear you're his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is infinite, undying-

Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.


*I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I'm under the table,
After four I'm under my host


*Woman wants monogamy;
Man delights in novelty.
Love is woman's moon and sun;
Man has other forms of fun.
Woman lives but in her lord;
Count to ten, and man is bored.
With this the gist and sum of it;
What earthy good can come of it?

*Love is like quicksilver in the hand.
Leave the fingers open and it stays.
Clutch it, and it darts away

The Dismantled Ship by Walt Whitman, 1819 - 1892

In some unused lagoon, some nameless bay,
On sluggish, lonesome waters, anchor'd near the shore,
An old, dismasted, gray and batter'd ship, disabled, done,
After free voyages to all the seas of earth, haul'd up at last and
hawser'd tight,
Lies rusting, mouldering.

Emily Dickinson Quotes

*A wounded deer leaps the highest.

*Celebrity is the chastisement of merit and the punishment of talent.

*Dying is a wild night and a new road.

*Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.

*For love is immortality.

*Forever is composed of nows.

*Fortune befriends the bold.

*He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust.

*Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul - and sings the tunes without the words - and never stops at all.

iPoem by George Bilgere, 1951 -

Someone's taken a bite
from my laptop's glowing apple,
the damaged fruit of our disobedience,
of which we must constantly be reminded.

There's the fatal crescent,
the dark smile
of Eve, who never dreamed of a laptop,
who, in fact, didn't even have clothes,
or anything else for that matter,

which was probably the nicest thing
about the Garden, I'm thinking,
as I sit here in the café
with my expensive computer,
afraid to get up even for a minute
in order to go to the bathroom
because someone might steal it

in this fallen world she invented
with a single bite
of an apple nobody, and I mean
nobody,
was going to tell her not to eat.

Bernard Malamud, 1914 - 1986

Novelist Bernard Malamud was born in Brooklyn, New York (1914). His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia, and they struggled to survive on the income from a tiny grocery store. He fell in love with movies when he was a kid, especially Charlie Chaplin movies, and found that he enjoyed retelling the plots of those movies to his classmates. He wanted to write, but he graduated from college in the middle of the Depression, and he was struggling just to earn enough money to eat and pay the rent. In 1940, he got a job as a clerk in the U.S. Census Bureau. He spent mornings checking drainage ditch statistics, but as soon as that work was done he would crouch over his desk and write short stories on company time.
Having discovered what he wanted to write about, Malamud decided to find a job that would give him more time for writing. So he applied for a position teaching freshman composition at Oregon State College. And it was there, thousands of miles away from his hometown in Brooklyn, that Malamud began to write stories mixing Jewish mysticism with his memories of people from his old neighborhood. They would eventually become the stories in his first collection, The Magic Barrel (1958). (less)

Essays of Francis Bacon, 1561 - 1626

Of Studies

STUDIES serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight, is in privateness and retiring; for ornament, is in discourse; and for ability, is in the judgment, and disposition of business. For expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, come best, from those that are learned. To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience: for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need proyning, by study; and studies themselves, do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience. Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation. Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books, else distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things. Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit: and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know, that he doth not. Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtile; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend. Abeunt studia in mores. Nay, there is no stond or impediment in the wit, but may be wrought out by fit studies; like as diseases of the body, may have appropriate exercises. Bowling is good for the stone and reins; shooting for the lungs and breast; gentle walking for the stomach; riding for the head; and the like. So if a man’s wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again. If his wit be not apt to distinguish or find differences, let him study the Schoolmen; for they are cymini sectores. If he be not apt to beat over matters, and to call up one thing to prove and illustrate another, let him study 197 the lawyers’ cases. So every defect of the mind, may have a special receipt.

Walt Whitman, 1819 - 1892

*A great city is that which has the greatest men and women.

*A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.

*After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains.

*All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor.

*And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death.

*And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero.

*And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.

*And your very flesh shall be a great poem.

*Behold I do not give lectures or a little charity, When I give I give myself.

*Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

*Every moment of light and dark is a miracle.

*Freedom - to walk free and own no superior.

*Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed.

*Have you heard that it was good to gain the day? I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.

*Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?

*He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.

*Henceforth I ask not good fortune. I myself am good fortune.

The Armful by Robert Frost, 1874 - 1963

For every parcel I stoop down to seize
I lose some other off my arms and knees,
And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns,
Extremes too hard to comprehend at. once
Yet nothing I should care to leave behind.
With all I have to hold with hand and mind
And heart, if need be, I will do my best.
To keep their building balanced at my breast.
I crouch down to prevent them as they fall;
Then sit down in the middle of them all.
I had to drop the armful in the road
And try to stack them in a better load.


Poet Robert Frost was born in San Francisco (1874). His father was a journalist and a hard drinker who died of tuberculosis when Frost was 11 years old. Frost moved with his mother to New England to live near family. He didn't do well in college. He dropped out of both Dartmouth and Harvard without taking a degree. He wanted to marry his high school sweetheart and tried to impress her with a book of poems he'd written. When she wasn't impressed, he considered drowning himself in a swamp, but decided not to go through with it at the last minute.

He finally married the girl and supported himself as a teacher for a few years, writing poetry on the side. Then, in 1900, he and his wife lost their first child, which sent Frost into a deep despair. So his grandfather took pity on him and bought him a farm in Derry, New Hampshire, in hopes that it would give him a steady income. Frost never really took to farming, but it gave him something to write about, and it was in those years on the farm that he began to write the poems that would make his name.

He published his first two collections, A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), the latter of which contains many of Frost's early masterpieces, including "Mending Wall," "The Death of the Hired Man," "After Apple-Picking," and "Home Burial."
Source: The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor

Robert Frost
Fireflies in the Garden

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.

Dorothy Parker, 1893 - 1967

What Have I Got to Complain About

David Wolk Budbill 1940-


We've got enough money now not to worry every minute
about where the next dollar is coming from.
We even go to the movies once in a while.
We've got a nice collection of friends.
Our house is sturdy and well built.
It keeps us warm and stands well against the storms.
The larder is full of rice.
There are plenty of potatoes down cellar.
The freezer is full of vegetables I grew myself.

In the face of all that, slights to my vanity
seem frivolous and nonsensical.

What have I got to complain about?

E.B. White, 1899 - 1985

The essayist and children's writer E.B. White, was born Elwin Brooks White in Mount Vernon, New York (1899).
After college, he had a few gigs as a journalist, taking time in between to travel across the country with a friend in a Model T and to work on a cruise ship in Alaska. Then he moved back to New York, and he picked up The New Yorker the year it came out, liked it, and sent some pieces in. He was a regular contributor and a couple of years later became a staff member. He married Katharine Angell, an editor at the magazine.
After 11 years in the city, they moved to a farmhouse in rural Maine. White kept writing for The New Yorker, but he also started publishing a monthly essay in Harper's called "One Man's Meat," about his experience with rural life. He especially liked to write about the animals he kept on his farm.
E.B. White had 18 nephews and nieces, and they were always asking him to tell stories. He wasn't very good at thinking up stories on the spot, so he started working on a children's book so that he would always have a story on hand. He had gotten the idea years before — as he remembered it, "I took a train to Virginia, got out, walked up and down in the Shenandoah Valley in the beautiful springtime, then returned to New York by rail. While asleep in an upper berth, I dreamed of a small character who had the features of a mouse, was nicely dressed, courageous, and questing. When I woke up, being a journalist and thankful for small favors, I made a few notes about this mouse-child — the only fictional figure ever to have honored and disturbed my sleep." So he slowly collected more and more stories about the mouse-child, and after about 15 years he had a real manuscript, and his wife suggested that he send it to a publisher. He did, and that book was Stuart Little (1945), which begins: "When Mrs. Frederick C. Little's second son arrived, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse."
After a young pig he was raising got sick and he failed to save its life, he wrote one of his most famous essays, "Death of a Pig." Then he wrote a children's novel in which the pig doesn't have to die: Charlotte's Web (1952). It's the story of a runt pig named Wilbur who is saved the first time by a little girl and the second time by a wise spider, and it was inspired by White's observations of the animals on his farm, including the spiders. It is one of the best-selling children's books of all time.
E.B. White said, "I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." (less)

Prayer for Our Daughters by: Mark Jarman, 1952 -

May they never be lonely at parties
Or wait for mail from people they haven't written
Or still in middle age ask God for favors
Or forbid their children things they were never forbidden.

May hatred be like a habit they never developed
And can't see the point of, like gambling or heavy drinking.
If they forget themselves, may it be in music
Or the kind of prayer that makes a garden of thinking.

May they enter the coming century
Like swans under a bridge into enchantment
And take with them enough of this century
To assure their grandchildren it really happened.

May they find a place to love, without nostalgia
For some place else that they can never go back to.
And may they find themselves, as we have found them,
Complete at each stage of their lives, each part they add to.

May they be themselves, long after we've stopped watching.
May they return from every kind of suffering
(Except the last, which doesn't bear repeating)
And be themselves again, both blessed and blessing.

_______
A Prayer for my Daughter William Butler Yeats 1865–1939

An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?

Helpless

by: Neil Young, 1945-

There is a town in north Ontario,
With dream comfort memory to spare,
And in my mind
I still need a place to go,
All my changes were there.

Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.
Leave us

Helpless, helpless, helpless
Baby can you hear me now?
The chains are locked
and tied across the door,
Baby, sing with me somehow.

Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.
Leave us

Helpless, helpless, helpless.