Because in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.
I’m very impressed that you know this by heart. But S is Susan (my wife, who had a postcard with her namesake’s untimely passing on it).
Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus
and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold
upon the Achaeans, hurled in their multitudes to the
house of Hades the strong souls of heroes, but gave their bodies
to be the delicate feasting of dogs, of all birds,
and the will of Zeus was accomplished since that time
when first there stood in division of conflict Atreus’ son, the lord of men,
and brilliant Achilleus. What god was it then set them together in bitter collision?
Zeus’s son, and Leto’s, Apollo, who, in anger at the king,
drove the foul pestilence along the host, and the people perished.
- Lattimore’s translation of The Iliad
O Fortuna velut luna status variabilis
Semper crescis aut decrescis
Vita detestabilis
Nunc obdurat et tunc curat
Ludo mentis aciem
Egestatem potestatum
Dissolvit ut glaciem
Sors immanis et innanis
Rota tu volubilis
Status malus vana salus
semper dissolubilis
Obrum brata et velata
Mihi quoque niteris
Nunc per ludum dorsum nudum
Ferro tui sceleris
Sors salutis et virtutis
Mihi nunc contraria
Est affectus et defectus
semper in angaria
Hac in hora sine mora
Corde pulsum tangite
Quod per sortem sternet fortem
Mecum omnes plangite
-
O Fortuna, from Carmina Burana
In taberna quando summus
Non curamus quid sit humus
Sed ad ludum properamus
Cui semper insudamus
Quid agator in taberna
Ubi numus et pincerna
Hoc est opus in querator
Si quid loquor audiator
- In taberna (the first two stanzas, anyway), from Carmina Burana
With gratuitous apologies for any butchery of Latin I may have committed.
Ben Battle was a soldier bold
And used to war’s alarms,
But a cannonball took off his legs
So he laid down his arms…
–Thomas Hood, Faithless Nelly Gray
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
–Thomas Gray, Elegy in a Country Churchyard
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow,
A poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more.
It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
–Shakespeare, Macbeth
COCKSUCKERS!!!
–Calamity Jane, in the HBO series: Deadwood
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
- William Butler Yeats
“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.
They kill us for their sport.”
- Shakespeare, King Lear
“Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy”
- Ben Franklin
I hate to do this, but:
are actually Ernest, Maud, and Susan.
A Elbereth Gilthoniel
Silivren penna miriel
O galadhremin ennorath
Fanuilos, le linnathon
Nef aiar si nef airon
Tolkien, Lord of the Rings.
Aye, every inch a king.
When I do stare, see how the subject quakes.
I pardon that man’s life.
What was thy cause?
Adultery?
Thou wilt not die; die for adultery, no!
The wren goes to it, and the small gilded fly does lecher in my sight.
Let copulation thrive! For Gloucester’s bastard son was kinder to his father,
than my daughers, got between lawful sheets.
Shakespeare, King Lear. (Although it was actually Monty Python’s “The Album of the Soundtrack of the Trailer of the Film of Monty Python and the Holy Grail” that brought it to my attention.
“You’ve got to have a catcher, otherwise you’ll have a lot of passed balls.” ~ Casey Stengel
“I gave Mike Cuellar more chances than my first wife” ~ Earl Weaver
“The only thing Earl knows about pitching is that he couldn’t hit it.” ~ Jim Palmer
“Mr. Churchill, if you were my husband, I’d poison your coffee!”
“Madam, if you were my wife, I’d surely drink it.”
All of Robert Service’s ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’ – goes down well with middle schoolers:D
My nuclear physicist BIL taught me lots when I was an impressionable lass:
One day in the middle of the night
Two dead boys stood up to fight
They stood back to back and faced each other
Drew their swords and shot each other.
A deaf policemen heard the noise,
Came and shot the two dead boys.
If you don’t believe me, ask the blind man
He saw it all.
And the parody of ‘Show me the way to go home’ of Jaws fame:
Indicate the way to my residence
I’m fatigued and I wish to retire
I had a sip of cider 60 minutes ago
and it went straight to my cerebellum
Wherever I perambulate
On land or sea or atmospheric vapor
You can always hear me singing this melody
Show me the way to go home.
What a thing to teach a ten-year old.:rolleyes:
Oh… also
Three rings for the elven kings under the sky…
===
and also
Not all that is gold glitters …
“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax
Of cabbages and kings
And why the sea is boiling hot
And whether pigs have wings.”
The Walrus and The Carpenter
Lewis Carroll
*I don’t mind day
Night comes and goes,
It’s afternoons
Get up my nose.
Nothing to do
In your see-through shell
Afternoons for prawns
Are hell*
My life is light
Waiting like a feath on the back of my hand.
Dust in sunlight, and memory in corners
Wait for the wind that chills
Towards the dead land
Eilot, A Song for Simeon
She sat on the saddle, said hells, pulled it off, and began painstaking redesigning it to follow the curve of Talat’s back, and her legs.
-Robin McKinley, The Hero and the Crown
There’s a certain shaft of light
Winter afternoons
That oppresses, like the heft
Of cathedral tunes…
Emily Dickinson
*Today I ruined a perfectly good salad. *
-Nigel Slater, Kitchen Diaries
“Well, the subject of Egyptian Burrito came up”, I said."
-Calvin Trillin, Don’t Mention It
Oh, wait, this wasn’t Quotes You’ve Got Floating Around In Your Head Right Now?
O Antony. I have followed thee to this…
We could not stall together in the whole world:
But yet let me lament with tears
As sov’reign as the blood of hearts
That thou, my brother… my mate in empire,
Friend and companion in the front of war…
That our stars, unreconciliable, should divide
Our equalness to this.
Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra by Samuel Barber, sliced and diced from Shakespeare and set to beautiful music
Give me some music; music, moody food
Of us that trade in love
Cleopatra, Antony and Cleopatra
Oh, and that too.
“The gods gathered like flies above the sacrifice, drawn by it’s sweet savor.” - Epic of Gilgamesh IIRC
“Perhaps it’s men who are the cowards, at the Core.” - Niven’s At the Core, where it’s discovered that the galactic core is exploding; humans pretty much ignore it, while the cowardly Puppeteer civilization flees.
“With such a weapon I could vaporize the Earth !”
“Speaker !”
“It was a natural thought Louis.” - Speaker To Animals and Louis Wu, Ringworld
“What we’ve got here…is failure to communicate. Some men you just can’t reach. So you get what we had here last week. Which is the way he wants it. Well, he gets it. And I don’t like it, any more than you men.” - Strother Martin from Cool Hand Luke
Not the author, obviously, but he delivered the passage in the movie.
If you’re going though hell,Keep going. – Winston Churchill
Ones I really love (not that I don’t love the above ones).
The problem with communication between the sexes", said MacPhee, “Is that women use a language without nouns. If two men are working in a kitchen together, one would say to the other, 'Put this bowl in the blue one you’ll find on top of the refrigerator. If two women are, one would say to the other, ‘Put this one in that one over there.’ Thus there is a phatic hiatus.”
-C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
*I do not know much about gods
But I think that the river is a strong, brown god.
Sullen, untamed, and intractable,
Patient to some degree. A t first recognised as a frontier
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities,
Ever, however, intractable. Keeping his seasons and rages,
Destroyer, reminder of what men choose to forget…
The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices.
The salt is on the briar rose
The fog is in the fir tree.
The sea howl, and the sea yelp, are different voices
Often together heard
The whine in the rigging
The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water,
The distant rote in the granite teeth,
The wailing warning of the distant headland,
And the heaving groaner, rounded homeward
Are all sea voices…*
-Eliot, The Dry Salvages
*At fourteen I married My Lord you
I never laughed, being bashful
I lowered my head to the wall
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back
At fifteen I stopped scowling.
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever
Why should I climb the lookout?
At sixteen you departed,
And went into far Ku-To-Yen, by the river of swirling eddies
And you have been gone now five months.
The monkey make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet as you went out.
By the gate, now, the moss is grown
The different mosses. too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August,
Over the grass in the west garden.
They hurt me- I grow older.
If you are coming down through the Narrows of the river Kiang
Please let me know beforehand, and I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-sa.*
-Ezra Pound, The River-Merchant’s Wife- A Letter
"If chaos were lightning, he would be the man on top of a hill in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting “All gods are bastards!’”
– The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett