Excerpts of excellence

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DRSB
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Re: Excerpts of excellence

Post by DRSB » Tue Aug 03, 2010 4:32 pm

"Eugene Onegin", an absolutely delightful read: http://lib.ru/LITRA/PUSHKIN/ENGLISH/onegin_j.txt

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Re: Excerpts of excellence

Post by Trolldor » Tue Aug 03, 2010 4:33 pm

"The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan. Many people don't like that statement but few can argue with it."

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Re: Excerpts of excellence

Post by AnInconvenientScotsman » Tue Aug 03, 2010 9:28 pm

From John Stuart Mill's On Liberty:

"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind"

From Nelson Mandela's Long Walk To Freedom:

"It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man's freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else's freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity... For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning."

Harry S. Truman:

"Of course, there are dangers in religious freedom and freedom of opinion. But to deny these rights is worse than dangerous, it is absolutely fatal to liberty. The external threat to liberty should not drive us into suppressing liberty at home. Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination."
When I feel sad, I stop being sad and be awesome instead.
True story.
SUIT UP!
"Dear God, dear Lord, dear vague muscular man with a beard or a sword,
Dear good all seeing being; my way or the highway Yahweh,
The blue-balled anti-masturbator, the great all-loving faggot-hater
I thank your holy might, for making me both rich and white"

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Re: Excerpts of excellence

Post by drl2 » Tue Aug 03, 2010 11:43 pm

I'm really not much of a poetry person (whenever I try to write a poem I'm looking for a rhyme for Nantucket by the end of the first line), so I'm rather surprised at the first couple of things that sprang to mind:

The Cottage of Lost Play

We knew that land once, You and I,
and once we wandered there
in the long days now long gone by,
a dark child and a fair.
Was it on the paths of firelight thought
in winter cold and white,
or in the blue-spun twilit hours
of little early tucked-up beds
in drowsy summer night,
that you and I in Sleep went down
to meet each other there,
your dark hair on your white nightgown
and mine was tangled fair?

We wandered shyly hand in hand,
small footprints in the golden sand,
and gathered pearls and shells in pails,
while all about the nightingales
were singing in the trees.
We dug for silver with our spades,
and caught the sparkle of the seas,
then ran ashore to greenlit glades,
and found the warm and winding lane
that now we cannot find again,
between tall whispering trees.

There was neither night nor day,
an ever-eve of gloaming light,
when first there glimmered into sight
the Little House of Play.
New-built it was, yet very old,
white, and thatched with straws of gold,
and pierced with peeping lattices
that looked toward the sea;
and our own children's garden-plots
were there: our own forget-me-nots,
red daisies, cress and mustard,
and radishes for tea.
There all the borders, trimmed with box,
were filled with favourite flowers, with phlox,
with lupins, pinks, and hollyhocks,
beneath a red may-tree;
and all the gardens full of folk
that their own little language spoke,
but not to You and Me.

For some had silver watering-cans
and watered all their gowns,
or sprayed each other; some laid plans
to build their houses, little towns
and dwellings in the trees.
And some were clambering on the roof;
some crooning lonely and aloof;
some dancing round the fairy-rings
all garlanded in daisy-strings,
while some upon their knees
before a little white-robed king
crowned with marigold would sing
their rhymes of long ago.
But side by side a little pair
with heads together, mingled hair,
went walking to and fro
still hand in hand; and what they said,
ere Waking far apart them led,
that only we now know.

-- JRR Tolkien



For some reason I dredged up the memory of two of Milton's works which were deliberately set as counterpoints to one another:

Il Penseroso and L'Allegro


I liked Mark Twain's "The War Prayer" even before I became an evil militant atheist:

"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
Who needs a signature anyway?

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Re: Excerpts of excellence

Post by DRSB » Sat Aug 28, 2010 4:16 pm

He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force,
Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.

Locksley Hall (1842)
Alfred Tennyson

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Re: Excerpts of excellence

Post by Trolldor » Tue Aug 31, 2010 11:55 pm

"Virginity is a precious gift. Please give generously."

...I forget.
"The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan. Many people don't like that statement but few can argue with it."

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Re: Excerpts of excellence

Post by Animavore » Sat Sep 25, 2010 9:46 pm

Cancer’s a Funny Thing

I wish I had the voice of Homer
To sing of rectal carcinoma,
Which kills a lot more chaps, in fact,
Than were bumped off when Troy was sacked.
Yet, thanks to modern surgeon’s skills,
It can be killed before it kills
Upon a scientific basis
In nineteen out of twenty cases.
I noticed I was passing blood
(Only a few drops, not a flood).
So pausing on my homeward way
From Tallahassee to Bombay
I asked a doctor, now my friend,
To peer into my hinder end,
To prove or to disprove the rumour
That I had a malignant tumour.
They pumped in BaS04.
Till I could really stand no more,
And, when sufficient had been pressed in,
They photographed my large intestine,
In order to decide the issue
They next scraped out some bits of tissue.
(Before they did so, some good pal
Had knocked me out with pentothal,
Whose action is extremely quick,
And does not leave me feeling sick.)
The microscope returned the answer
That I had certainly got cancer,
So I was wheeled into the theatre
Where holes were made to make me better.
One set is in my perineurn
Where I can feel, but can’t yet see ‘em.
Another made me like a kipper
Or female prey of Jack the Ripper,
Through this incision, I don’t doubt,
The neoplasm was taken out,
Along with colon, and lymph nodes
Where cancer cells might find abodes.
A third much smaller hole is meant
To function as a ventral vent:
So now I am like two-faced Janus
The only* god who sees his anus.
I’ll swear, without the risk of perjury,
It was a snappy bit of surgery.
My rectum is a serious loss to me,
But I’ve a very neat colostomy,
And hope, as soon as I am able,
To make it keep a fixed time-table.
So do not wait for aches and pains
To have a surgeon mend your drains;
If he says “cancer” you’re a dunce
Unless you have it out at once,
For if you wait it’s sure to swell,
And may have progeny as well.
My final word, before I’m done,
Is “Cancer can be rather fun”.
Thanks to the nurses and Nye Bevan
The NHS is quite like heaven
Provided one confronts the tumour
With a sufficient sense of humour.
I know that cancer often kills,
But so do cars and sleeping pills;
And it can hurt one till one sweats,
So can bad teeth and unpaid debts.
A spot of laughter, I am sure,
Often accelerates one’s cure;
So let us patients do our bit
To help the surgeons make us fit


1. In India there are several more
With extra faces, up to four,
But both in Brahma and in Shiva
I own myself an unbeliever.

J.B.S. Haldane
Libertarianism: The belief that out of all the terrible things governments can do, helping people is the absolute worst.

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Re: Excerpts of excellence

Post by DRSB » Sun Sep 26, 2010 6:49 am

Pappa »
Mon Aug 02, 2010 10:40 am

Charlou wrote:Kafka



I ♥ Kafka
[/quote]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/magaz ... ranz_kafka

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Re: Excerpts of excellence

Post by charlou » Tue Sep 28, 2010 6:08 am

Interesting read .. thanks for that.
no fences

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Re: Excerpts of excellence

Post by charlou » Sat Aug 06, 2011 3:13 am

Reading Sebastian Faulk's Birdsong ...

from Part Four, France 1917 ...


.Stephen laid the letter down on the rough surface of the table, in the grooves of which the rat's blood had dried. Then he rested his head in his hands. He had received an answer to the simple question that had intrigued him. Isabelle no longer loved him; or if she did, she loved him in some distant way that did not affect her actions or her feelings for another man.
.When he looking into his reserves of strength he found that he could bear this thought. He told himself that the feeling they had for each other still existed, but that it existed at a different time.
.Once when he had stood in the chilling cathedral in Amiens he had foreseen the numbers of the dead. It was not a premonition, more a recognition, he told himself, that the difference between death and life was not one of fact but merely of time. This belief had helped him to bear the sound of the dying on the slopes Thiepval. And so he was now able to believe that his love for Isabelle, and hers for him, was safe in its extreme ardour - not lost, but temporarily alive in a manner as significant as any present or future state of feeling could be in the long darkness of death.
.He put Jeanne's letter in his pocket and went out into the trench where Ellis came sliding along the duckboards to meet him.

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Re: Excerpts of excellence

Post by apophenia » Sun Aug 07, 2011 8:25 am

Image
Image

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Re: Excerpts of excellence

Post by Cormac » Sun Aug 07, 2011 8:41 am

Trolldor wrote:I do not like them
Sam I am.
I do not like Green Eggs and Ham.
If you don't eat your meat, how can you have any pudding? How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?
FUCKERPUNKERSHIT!


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You're my wife now!

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Re: Excerpts of excellence

Post by Cormac » Sun Aug 07, 2011 8:54 am

Austin Clarke, an unsung but great Irish poet.


The Blackbird of Derrycairn

Stop, stop and listen for the bough top
Is whistling and the sun is brighter
Than God's own shadow in the cup now
Forget the hour bell. Mournful matins
Will sound as well, Patric, at nightfall.

Faintly through mist of broken water
Fionn heard my melody in Norway,
He found the forest track he brought back
This beak to gild the branch and tell there
Why men must welcome in the daylight.

He loved the breeze that warns the black grouse,
The shout of gillies in the morning
When packs are counted and the swans cloud
Loch Erne, but more than all those voices,
My throat rejoicing from the hawthorn.

In little cells behind a cashel,
Patric, no handbell has a glad sound,
But knowledge is found among the branches.
Listen! The song that shakes my feathers
Will thong the leather of your satchels.

Stop, stop and listen for the bough top
Is whistling . . .


The Planter's Daughter

When night stirred at sea,
An the fire brought a crowd in
They say that her beauty
Was music in mouth
And few in the candlelight
Thought her too proud,
For the house of the planter
Is known by the trees.

Men that had seen her
Drank deep and were silent,
The women were speaking
Wherever she went --
As a bell that is rung
Or a wonder told shyly
And O she was the Sunday
In every week.


The Lost Heifer

When the black herds of the rain were grazing,
In the gap of the pure cold wind
And the watery hazes of the hazel
Brought her into my mind,
I thought of the last honey by the water
That no hive can find.

Brightness was drenching through the branches
When she wandered again,
Turning sliver out of dark grasses
Where the skylark had lain,
And her voice coming softly over the meadow
Was the mist becoming rain.
FUCKERPUNKERSHIT!


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You're my wife now!

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Re: Excerpts of excellence

Post by charlou » Mon Aug 08, 2011 3:31 am

Animavore wrote: :what: I think some people need to look up the word "excerpt".

There is a thread for poems here.
no fences

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Re: Excerpts of excellence

Post by Cormac » Mon Aug 08, 2011 8:32 am

charlou wrote:
Animavore wrote: :what: I think some people need to look up the word "excerpt".

There is a thread for poems here.
:)

Pick any two lines from Clarke for a suitable excerpt of excellence...
FUCKERPUNKERSHIT!


Wanna buy some pegs Dave, I've got some pegs here...
You're my wife now!

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