I Found a Penny Today, So Here's a Thought

You've heard the cliché, "There's no 'I' in 'team.'"  Similarly, there's no "us" in "narcissism."

Speaking of contractions, there's no "big O" in "nymphomania."

"Ah, the spoon, the perfect spoon!  In its mystic bowl all men are one, and so are all women.  Champagne and shoulders, poetry and long scarves, loftiness, altruism, souls, hard work, conscience, sacrifice, all fuse into perfect oneness in the spoon.  All Whitman’s Songs of Himself and Other People lie in the hollow of a spoon.  If you seek the Infinite and the Nirvana, look not to death nor the after-life, nor yet to pure abstraction: but into the hollow spoon.”
—D. H. Lawrence, Mr Noon

"The sky is the limit"?  Perhaps for meteorologists and airline pilots.  Why set one's sights so low?

I misunderstood a warning sign that said "Hot cars kill dogs." I thought it was referring to a Corvette (fast cars run over animals), or perhaps a Jaguar (for a play on the food chain).

Folklore warns against eating oysters in months without "R's" (namely May through August).  Those oyster-free months constitute the "dog days of summer," which is ironic given that "R is the dog's letter" (Ben Jonson, 1636).

"In the curl of my tongue is the question still sleeping."  —Norman Mailer, Ancient Evenings

(Did we mention what an astonishing novel that is?)

Back in c. 1909, a teacher sent my great-great grandmother a note asking why her daughter didn't come to school and reassuring her that the classroom was warm, comfortable, and germ-free!  

Many decades later, I (as the hooky-player's 15-year-old grandson) testified before the Louisiana State Legislature on behalf of the state's first homeschooling bill.  That legislation became a model for several other states.

"Religion decays, the icon remains." —Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters

"The naïve question often proves to be the central one."  —Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10.5 Chapters

"When a King dies, we, who have to put into words the strange grief and grievous strangeness of the time, then know how ill we have served ourselves." —James Cameron, What a Way to Run the Tribe, 1968

From our Magic Words outpost at Blogger:

"I believe that everybody is singing an inner song, and the question isn't whether we are or not — we are! — the question is whether this is a song of power or a song of weakness; whether it is a song of love or a song of hatred.  That's the question."

—Eugene Burger, from his interview in The Magic Circular (May 2009)

"There's nothing beautiful and excellent left.  You must dream up beauty and goodness and justice.  Tell me, do you know how to dream?"  —Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten

"Something great and audacious must happen in secrecy and silence, or it perishes and falls away, and the fire that was awakened dies again."  —Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten

"People who get bored are ones who always reckon that something amusing ought to come at them from outside."  —Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten

"If one thinks, one resists, and that is always so ugly and ruinous to things.  Thinkers, if only they knew what harm they do.  Anyone who industriously does not think, does something, he certainly does, and that is more necessary."  —Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten

It's windy today, and we saw a crow valiantly flying against the current, making no headway.  From our less-windy vantage on the wooded cliff side, we were tempted to tell the crow to take the forest route, but then we remembered that you can't tell a crow how to fly from point A to point B.

Enriqve Enriqvez turns every U into a V on his blog. Here's why: "Like the stvdent who devovrs covntless books on the tarot and still feels thirsty, the letter U has a blvnt edge.  No matter how mvch information it holds, it is never ready to povr that knowledge back into the world."

"Go on yearning for a bit longer.  You've no idea what bliss, what grandeur there is in yearning, in waiting.  So wait."  —Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten

"I know it, somewhere here there are marvelous things." —Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten