E = mc[sup]2[/sup]
“But he never laughed.” (My Government 101 professor in college.)
What happens now? I’ll tell you what happens now. Your scumbag brother-in-law is finished. Done. You understand? I will own him, when this is over. Every cent he earns, every cent his wife earns, is mine. Every place he goes, anywhere he turns, I’m gonna be there, grabbing my share. He’ll be scrubbing toilets in Tijuana for pennies, and I’ll be standing over him, taking my cut. He’ll see me when he wakes up in the morning, and when he crawls to sleep in whatever rat hole is left for him after I shred his house down. I will haunt his crusty ass forever, until the day he sticks a gun up his mouth and pulls the trigger, just to get me out of his head. That’s what happens next.
The last line of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back carelessly into the past.”
“It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”
“I’m in a world of shit, yes… but I am alive, and I am not afraid.” -Private Joker, Full Metal Jacket
Words I’ve lived my whole life by.
If poetry counts:
honour corruption villainy holiness
riding in fragrance of sunlight(side by side
all in a singing wonder of blossoming yes
riding)to him who died that death should be dead
humblest and proudest eagerly wandering
(equally all alive in miraculous day)
merrily moving through sweet forgiveness of spring
(over the under the gift of the earth of the sky
knight and ploughman pardoner wife and nun
merchant frere clerk somnour miller and reve
and geoffrey and all)come up from the never of when
come into the now of forever come riding alive
down while crylessly drifting through vast most
nothing’s own nothing children go of dust
-e e cummings
{Excuse my posting this one again – on my mom’s gravestone:}
In a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christ is,
since he was what I am, and this Jack, joke, poor potsherd,
patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
- Gerard Manley Hopkins
The last line of this, quoted in full for context.
“Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement, for even the very wise cannot see all ends.” - Gandalf the Grey in The Fellowship of the Ring
“He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts”
Stephen King/Curt Siodmak
“When you hear sweet syncopation
And the music softly moans
T’ain’t no sin to take off your skin
And dance around in your bones”
Tom Waits
Isn’t it “ceaselessly”?
And lo, I beheld a pale horse, and his rider’s name was Death, and Hell followed with him.
This is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end, but it may be the end of the beginning.
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take effect.
Oh, arrgh, yes, it is!
I love the sentence, but don’t have it memorized, so I did a google search and copied and pasted it from somewhere. It did not occur to me that it would be worded incorrectly, and clearly I did not spot that mistake! I’m so frustrated, because the word “ceaselessly” is so important to the sentence. Sigh!
So let me try one more time:
The last line of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
- From: Pale Blue Dot. -By Carl Sagan.
I like the whole book/documentary, but specially this part:
“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.”
From “Pale Blue Dot” -
Dr. Carl Sagan pondered philosophically on a photo of the Earth taken by Voyager 1 from a distance of 6.1 billion kilometers (3.8 billion miles) - roughly the distance of Neptune.
As merciful blackness closed in, I was on my hands and knees, bunting the infernal thing along with my nose and whinnying, “Roll, confound you, roll!” - S.J. Perelman
It concerns the building of a children’s toy.
From a recent Cracked article:
“In terms of disappointment and betrayal, Mac and Me is the cinematic equivalent of Santa Claus delivering you a View-Master containing footage of your eventual death.”
Righteous! And cold!
The difficulties of transporting wine over interstellar distances are manifold.
“It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.”
The opening sentence of Anthony Burgess’s–ever after that line great, too–Earthly Powers. Brilliant on so many levels.
“Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”
–Arthur C. Clarke, The Nine Billion Names Of God