A Book a Week in 2011 - Highlights

But it isn’t all the same to us that night-time 

Runs out; that we must make do with today’s
Happenings, and stoop and somehow glue together
The silly little shards of our lives, so that
Our children can drink water from broken bowls,
Not from cupped hands. It isn’t the same at all.

    -Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill (Aubade)

Love is, at least in part, a response to energy.

    -P.D. James (Death Comes to Pemberly)

No other Odysseus will ever return to you.
That man and I are one, that man you see...
here after many hardships,
endless wanderings, after twenty years
I have come home to native ground at last."
    -Homer (Odyssey 16.232)

Hear my prayer, O LORD,

and give ear to my cry;

hold not your peace at my tears!

For I am a sojourner with you,

a guest, like all my fathers.

Look away from me, that I may smile again,

before I depart and am no more!”

      -Psalm 39

I am a child of Earth and the starry skies;
But my generation is of Heaven alone. This you know yourselves.
But I am parched with thirst and I perish. Give me quickly
the cold water flowing forth from the lake of Memory.

   -Anonymous Greek Funeral Tablet

The windows are dark in the town, child.
The whales huddle down in the deep.
I’ll read you one very last book if you swear
You’ll go the f*** to sleep.

    -Adam Mansbach (Go the F*** to Sleep)

But oh, whate'er the sky-led seasons mar,
Moon upon moon rebuilds it with her beams;
Come we where Tullus and where Ancus are
And good Aeneas, we are dust and dreams.

    -A.E. Housman (Diffugere Nives)

What's best, what serves us... leave it to the gods.
We're dearer to the gods than to ourselves.
Harassed by impulse and diseased desire,
we ask for wives, and children by those wives --
what wives and children heaven only knows.
Still if you will ask for something, pray for
a healthy body and a healthy soul,
a mind that is not terrified of death,
thinks length of days the least of nature's gifts --
courage that drives out anger and longing... our hero,
Hercules, and the pain of his great labor...
Success is worshipped as a god; it's we
who set her up in palace and cathedral.
I give you simply what you have already.

    -Robert Lowell (Juvenal's Satires)

Once bread becomes toast, it can never be bread again.

    -Anonymous (Sirkus Bathroom Wall)