"What have we given?

My friend, blood shaking my heart

The awful daring of a moment's surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract."

--T.S. Eliot, from The Waste Land

 

 

"Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)"

--Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself

 

 

"I just skipped and jumped and danced along and I had really learned that you can't fall off a mountain. Whether you can fall off a mountain or not I don't know, but I had learned that you can't. That was the way it struck me."

--Jack Kerouac, from Dharma Bums

 

 

"John Gardner spent fifteen years flinging himself against the bubble before he got out. He's dead now, of course, died three Septembers ago, it killed him, getting out did, but at least he did get out."

--Rick Bass, from "Cats and Students, Bubbles and Abysses," The Watch

 

 

"He seemed so cocksure, you see. And yet none of his certainties was worth one strand of a woman's hair. Living as he did, like a corpse, he couldn't even be sure he was alive. It might look as if my hands were empty. Actually, I was sure of myself, sure about everything, far surer than he; sure of my present life and of the death that was coming. That, no doubt, was all I had; but at least that certainty was something I could get my teeth into--just as it had got its teeth into me. I'd been right. I was still right, I was always right. I'd passed my life in a certain way, and I might have passed it in a different way, if I'd felt like it."

--Albert Camus, from The Stranger

 

 

"If you can't hear me, it's because I'm in parentheses."
and

"There's a fine line between fishing and standing on the shore like an idiot."

"I spilled spot remover on my dog and now he's gone."

--Steven Wright

 

 

Say things right, or say things wrong: within each moment, you only get one chance to say them.

 

--You can navigate to the sources for the quotes above (and to some referenced in the comments) by following these links:

 

1. The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot;

2. Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman;

3. Dharma Bums, by Jack Kerouac;

4. The Watch, by Rick Bass;

5. The Stranger, by Albert Camus;

6. I have a Pony (Audio), by Steven Wright--Hurry: this one's almost gone;

7. A Father's Story, by Andre Dubus (see comments);

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