Camp Commandant: Make the best of what we offer you, and you will suffer less than you deserve.
Papillon
“Tuez-les tous; Dieu reconnaitra les siens.”
(“Kill them all; for the Lord knoweth them that are His.”)
Arnaud-Amaury, Abbot of Citeaux, 1209, when asked by the Crusaders what to do with the citizens of Beziers who were a mixture of Catholics and Cathars.
Delbert Grady : I feel you will have to deal with this matter in the harshest possible way, Mr. Torrance.
Jack Torrance : There’s nothing I look forward to with greater pleasure, Mr. Grady.
Delbert Grady : Perhaps they need a good talking to, if you don’t mind my saying so. Perhaps a bit more. My girls, sir, they didn’t care for the Overlook at first. One of them actually stole a pack of matches, and tried to burn it down. But I “corrected” them sir. And when my wife tried to prevent me from doing my duty, I “corrected” her.
My favorite bitter quote is from a song done by Leslie Fish. I don’t know if she used music for it found elsewhere, wrote the music herself, or what. What I do know is that the lyrics are from one of Rudyard Kipling’s poems. The title of the poem is: The Birds of Prey March. The music that Fish put it to is a cheerful marching tune - it really does make one want to step out and move.
The final line is: “The large birds of prey will carry us away, and you’ll never see your soldiers anymore.”
Another favorite poem is Randall Jarrell’s Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner, and the chilling last line: “And when I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.”
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
“…I could viddy myself very clear running and running on like very light and mysterious nogas, carving the whole litso of the creeching world with my cut-throat britva…I was cured all right.”
Norman Bates : I think I must have one of those faces you can’t help believing.
Norman Bates : She might have fooled me, but she didn’t fool my mother.
Norman Bates : She’s as harmless as one of those stuffed birds.
Norman Bates : You know what I think? I think that we’re all in our private traps, clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out. We scratch and we claw, but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it, we never budge an inch.
Norman Bates : People always mean well. They cluck their thick tongues, and shake their heads and suggest, oh so very delicately.
The original Psycho can still scare the shit out of an unsuspecting, first-time viewer. :eek:
Don’t forget;
Norman, as mother:
"They’re probably watching me. Well, let them. Let them see what kind of a person I am. I’m not even going to swat that fly. I hope they are watching… they’ll see. They’ll see and they’ll know, and they’ll say, “Why, she wouldn’t even harm a fly…”
…You cannot say, or guess,
for you know only a heap of broken images,
where the sun beats,
and the dead tree gives no shelter,
the cricket no relief,
and the dry stone no sound of water…
…I will show you fear in a handful of dust…
From TS Eliot’s The Wasteland
The first time I saw Psycho I went with my older cousins, I think I was about 9. I didn’t look in the mirror when we left the theater, but I swear my hair was standing straight up on my head. I think I heard those violins (the ones that shriek during the bludgeoning scene) when I awoke from a nightmare that night (Mrs. Bates? Is that you?) and tried to get back to sleep. And of course, taking a shower was an anxious adventure for quite some time.
“When children are in their swathe cloutes, then are they subject to the whip.” -John Lyly, 1579
“Nach dem Krieg bleiben wir im dem Westen” - Hitler (My German isn’t very good, but my uncle assured me this means, “After the war we will remain in the West.”)
“The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.” (Omar Khayyam)
(correct me if I misquoted it–I don’t have the original with me)
“Delenda est Carthago” (Destroyed is Carthage.)
“We are not having a ‘leadership crisis,’ but, strictly speaking, a ‘Leader Crisis.’”–Goebbels after Stalingrad, if you believe Albert Speer
“A census was taken in Januargy 1937, but the results were suppressed on the grounds that ‘a serpent’s nest of traitors in the apparatus of Soviet statistics’ had ‘exerted themselves to diminish the population of the USSR.’ Those responsible, were, of course, shot.” --R. Conquest, Breaker of Nations
“A furore Normanorum libera nos O Domine” --From the fury of Norsemen deliver us, O Lord.
“The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.” (Omar Khayyam)
(correct me if I misquoted it–I don’t have the original with me)
Pretty good memory. Substitute ‘thy’ for ‘your’ in the second and last line, and you’re there. Actually Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of Omar Khayyam, to be pedantic.
“Delenda est Carthago” (Destroyed is Carthage.)
This translates as “Carthage must be destroyed”: Delenda is the gerundive, or passive adjective form - something/where/one which must be done. For example, the name Amanda follows the same form: “she who must be loved”.
End of show-off Latin lesson. Normal transmission resumes.
As most people will know, these are the famous words of Marcus Porcius Cato, repeated again and again at the end of his many speeches while he was Censor of the Roman state. Cato insisted that the thriving city of Carthage, (Tunesia) a fierce competitor for Rome’s economic power, should be destroyed. Whether Cato’s nagging did the trick or not, in the end the Romans did go to war. They burned Carthage to the ground. Many sources say they went as far as poisoning the fertile fields around the city with salt, so Cartage would never rise again. It never did.