| 19 March, 2009 |
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Never play leapfrog with a unicorn. People are far more sincere and good-humored at speeding their parting guests than on meeting them. Holidays are an expensive trial of strength. The only satisfaction comes from survival. Gifts are like hooks. In the fight between you and the world, back the world. Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. It is better to be quotable than to be honest. Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account. In California everyone goes to a therapist, is a therapist, or is a therapist going to a therapist. Bore: a man who is never unintentionally rude. New York is the only city in the world where you can get deliberately run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian. Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff - it is a palliative rather than a remedy. Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger. Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes. I knew her before she was a virgin. We may eventually come to realize that chastity is no more a virtue than malnutrition. Celibacy is not hereditary. Virginity is in the lies of the beholder. Aliter catuli longe olent, aliter sues. When she was a small girl, Amanda hid a ticking clock in an old, rotten tree trunk. It drove woodpeckers crazy. Ignoring tasty bugs all around them, they just about beat their brains out trying to get at the clock. Years later, Amanda used the woodpecker experiment as a model for understanding capitalism, Communism, Christianity, and all other systems that traffic in future rewards rather than in present realities. What torture, this life in society! Often someone is obliging enough to offer me a light, and in order to oblige him I have to fish a cigarette out of my pocket. The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself. Justice is incedental to law and order. Reading musses up my mind. Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron. What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy? If you are ruled by mind you are a king; if by body, a slave. Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot. What is the matter with the poor is poverty; what is the matter with the rich is uselessness. A clergyman is one who feels himself called upon to live without working at the expense of the rascals who work to live. When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in confederacy against him. In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from. America is a large friendly dog in a small room. Every time it wags its tail it knocks over a chair. The United States is like the guy at the party who gives cocaine to everybody and still nobody likes him. When I get smitten, I stay smut. The English think incompetence is the same thing as sincerity. War is the biggest ego trip of all time. Men are like steel. When they lose their temper, they lose their worth. Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure; Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure. The main thing is you and I should exist, and that we should be you and I. Apart from that let everything go as it likes. The best order of things to my way thinking, is the one I was meant to be part of, and to hell with the most perfect of worlds if I am not in it. I would rather exist, even as an impudent argufier, than not exist at all. ...all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and (there is) no cause to value one above the other. Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong. Egotism is the anesthetic given by a kindly nature to relieve the pain of being a damned fool. On Monday mornings I am dedicated to the proposition that all men are created jerks. Chastity always takes its toll. In some it produces pimples; in others, sex laws. If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative. If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament. Responsiblity is a unique concept. It can only reside and inhere in a single individual. You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you. You may disclaim it, but you cannot divest yourself of it. Many a man has fallen in love with a girl in a light so dim he would not have chosen a suit by it. A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything. |
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