I had a bad day.

[minxy]

No, seriously. An prep I worked all week on FAILED right before it became useful, and then my housemate (accidentally) wailed on me with a racquet later when I met her at the gym.

Leading to a HEAD WOUND.

Well, okay, just a big goose egg on my forehead, but it required ice! And it is still swollen a little and it hurts today!

And I may have volunteered to give a journal club presentation in my woe over the failed experiment (dammit! I was going to do some fun stuff today and now I can't on account of LOSING THAT PREP.)

One of my grad students tried to suggest that I buy a lotto ticket yesterday in anticipation of the dramatic karmic upswing that was bound to happen. He underestimated the depths of bad karma that would apparently be plumbed.

It's a tale of woe.

To cheer myself up, I'm posting a quote dump, collected since the last time I posted a quote dump, but with significantly more poetry, actually. I partially blame synecdochic for introducing me to a kick-ass poetry community called breathe_poetry. As before, there is very little fannish relevance here, unless one of you take these as inspiration.

Quote Dump 11/2/07

Only one man in a thousand is a leader. The other 999 follow women.
-–Groucho Marx

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, --- I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! --- and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
--Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Vast are the forces of the infidel race;
They sail rapidly, rowing and steering.
At the mastheads and on the lofty prows
There are many carbuncles and lanterns;
From up on high they cast so much light
That by night the sea becomes more beautiful
And, when they arrive at the land of Spain,
The whole country is lit up and illumintated by them.
The news of this reaches Marsiles.
-The Song of Roland (Lines 2630-2638)

If he touched her, he couldn't talk to her, if he loved her he couldn't leave, if he spoke he couldn't listen, if he fought he couldn't win.
--Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

You take my hand and
I'm suddenly in a bad movie,
it goes on and on and
why am I fascinated

We waltz in slow motion
through an air stale with aphorisms
we meet behind endless potted palms
you climb through the wrong windows

Other people are leaving
but I always stay till the end
I paid my money, I
want to see what happens

In chance bathtubs I have to
peel you off me
in the form of smoke and melted
celluloid

Have to face it I'm
finally an addict,
the smell of popcorn and worn plush
lingers for weeks
--Margaret Atwood, from "Power Politics"

"May whatever breaks
be reconstructed by the sea
with the long labor of its tides."
--Pablo Neruda, Ode to Broken Things

...ignoring the bad things makes it easier for you to carry on. But ignoring the bad things makes you end up believing that bad things never happen. You are always surprised by them. It surprises you that guns can kill, that money corrupts, that snow fall in winter. Such naivety can be charming; alas, it can also be perilous.
--Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters

The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and a seal. It could not be better expressed.
--Mark Twain, Letter to the Earth

If you reveal your secrets to the wind you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.
--Kahlil Gibran

At the hour the streetlights come on, buildings
turn abstract. The Hudson, for a moment, formal.
We drink bourbon on the terrace and you speak
in the evening voice, weighted deep in the throat.

They plan to harvest oysters, you tell me,
from the harbor by Jersey City, how the waters
will be clean again in twenty years. I imagine nets
burdened with rough shells, the meat dun and sexual.

Below, the river and the high rock
where boys each year jump from bravado
or desperation. The day flares, turns into itself.
And innocently, sideways, the way we always fall

into grace or knowledge, we watched the police
drag the river for a suicide, the third this year.
The terrible hook, the boy's frail whiteness.
His face was blank and new as your face

in the morning before the day has worked
its pattern of lines and tensions. A hook
like an iron question and this coming
out of the waters, a flawed pearl —

a memory that wasn't ours to claim.
Perhaps, in a bedroom by lamplight,
a woman waits for this boy. She may riffle drawers
gathering photographs, string, keys to abandoned rooms.

Even now she may be leaving,
closing the door for some silence. I need
to move next to you. Water sluiced
from the boy's hair. I need to watch you

light your cigarette, the flickering
of your face in matchlight, as if underwater,
drifting away. I take your cigarette
and drag from it, touch your hand.

Remember that winter of your long fever,
the winter we understood how fragile
any being together was. The wall sweated
behind the headboard and you said you felt

the rim where dreams crouch
and every room of the past. It must begin in luxury —
do you think — a break and fall into the glamour
attending each kind of surrender. Water must flood

the mind, as in certain diseases, the walls
between the cells of memory dissolve, blur
into a single stream of voices and faces.
I don't know any more about this river or if

it can be cleaned of its tender and broken histories —
a tide of voices. And this is how the dead
rise to us, transformed: wet and singing,
the tide of voices pearling in our hands.
--Lynda Hull, Tide of Voices

"You enjoy my company, but hate being by yourself. You're always looking for adventure in order to forget more important things. You always want to feel the adrenaline flowing in your veins and you forget that the only thing that should be flowing through them is blood."
-- Paulo Coelho, The Zahir


I said I splendidly loved you; it's not true
But there are wanderers in the middle mist,
Who cry for shadows, clutch, and cannot tell
Whether they love at all, or, loving, whom:
An old song's lady, a fool in fancy dress,
Or phantoms, or their own face in the gloom;
For love of Love, or from heart's loneliness.
Pleasure's not theirs, nor pain. They doubt, and sigh,
And do not love at all. Of these am I
--Rupert Brooke


with the wires going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
--WS Merwin, Listen


"I wish I was a photograph
tucked into the corners of your wallet
I wish I was a photograph
you carried like a future in your pocket"
--Andrea Gibson, Photograph


All beings tremble before violence.
All fear death.
All love life.

See yourself in others.
Then whom can you hurt?
What harm can you do?
--The Dhammapada


I'll just bleed so the stars will have something dark to shine in.
--Frank Stanford


"Right now I want a word that describes the feeling you get--a cold, sick feeling deep down inside--when you know something is happening that will change you, and you don't want it to, but you can't stop it. And you know, for the first time, for the very first time, that there will now be a before and an after, a was and a will be. And that you will never again be quite the same person you were."
--Jennifer Donnelly, A Northern Light


The wind was a man with a lisp talking about people who had stabbed him in the back. I hurried to get home and escape him. The moon was a child's face squeezed against a screen, yelling curses down at us.
--Heather O'Neill, Lullabies for Little Criminals


I'll let myself sleep soon, and hope to hell the world doesn't seem so goddamn fractured when I wake up. Having said that, I also hope I wake to find half the city committed suicide in my honor.

-- Spider Jerusalem


"I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass."
-- Maya Angelou


I want to walk barefoot
in cities without streets
where admiration is a deep silence
and conversations are replaced by the eloquence of eyes
- Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie, barefoot stroll


And you are here, now with pearls in your
hair, and I want to dive to find you
and carry your pearls up to air between

my lips. And to hear you breathe in
as if you were breathing for the world
and will never stop. I sleep on a dune

as if an animal were waiting to carry me down
these beaches to you. And I cannot think of
a letter that is not in your name. And I cannot

think of your arms without my own wet and
stretching out. And I cannot dream of your eyes,
without them, right now, looking closely into mine.
--Ed Kleinschmidt, The Possibilities of Love


You do not want what you've been taught to want, and isn't this the secret you've been keeping for longer than any of them.... Leave her to dream of her silent house, the bed that's waiting for her and her husband in it, his eyes falling shut already. Sweet girl, you would drown in such a bed.
--Victoria Lancelotta

Random icon actually chose a headwound shot. Ironic.

That is all.