Memorable Passages

[Boon Mee]

Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout by Gary Snyder

Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.

I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.

[BaitongBoy]

[BaitongBoy]

Hay For The Horses

He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous Mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay
behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of haydust in the
sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral,
---The old mare nosing lunchpails,
Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds---
"I'm sixty-eight" he said,
"I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that's just what
I've gone and done."


- Gary Snyder

[BaitongBoy]

Mahatma Gandhi

[BaitongBoy]

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

[BaitongBoy]

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

[BaitongBoy]

Charles Bukowski, Factotum

[BaitongBoy]

Jack London, Martin Eden

[Boon Mee]

[BaitongBoy]

Jorge Luis Borges

[Chesty P.]

There are some things that can't be the truth even if they did happen.

-Ken Kesey

[Boon Mee]

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.
George Orwell, 1984

[fred]

It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.

Willy had a point.

[fred]

"I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me." - Noel Coward

This rather nice quote is a fantastic example of sarcasm, something the yank who claimed it wouldn't be able to understand.

[Boon Mee]

My Sad Captains by Thom Gunn

One by one they appear in
the darkness: a few friends, and
a few with historical
names. How late they start to shine!
but before they fade they stand
perfectly embodied, all

the past lapping them like a
cloak of chaos. They were men
who, I thought, lived only to
renew the wasteful force they
spent with each hot convulsion.
They remind me, distant now.

True, they are not at rest yet,
but now that they are indeed
apart, winnowed from failures,
they withdraw to an orbit
and turn with disinterested
hard energy, like the stars.