We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are

— Anais Nin

"Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth"

--Jean Paul Sartre, 'Words'

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

Confucius

“A fight is going on inside me,” said an old man to his son. “It is a terrible fight between two wolves. One wolf is evil. He is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other wolf is good. he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you.”

The son thought about it for a minute and then asked, “Which wolf will win?”

The old man replied simply, “The one you feed.”

JEREMY FINK AND THE MEANING OF LIFE, WENDY MASS

I don’t think I could love you so much if you had nothing to complain of and nothing to regret. I don’t like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and of little value. Life hasn’t revealed it’s beauty to them.

DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, BORIS PASTERNAK

"Do you know -- I hardly remembered you?"

"Hardly remembered me?"

"I mean: how shall I explain? I -- it's always so. Each time you happen to me all over again."

--Edith Wharton, 'The Age of Innocence'

She made no answer and he went on: "What's the use? You gave me my first glimpse at a real life, and at the same moment you asked me to go on with a sham one. it's beyond all human enduring - that's all".

"Oh, don't say that; when I'm enduring it!", she burst out, her eyes filling.

--Edith Wharton, 'The Age of Innocence'

"The man roared like a bull when a splinter was in his finger, and the woman muffled the moans of childbirth, lest she disturb him."

--Margaret Mitchell, 'Gone with the Wind'

"All right- now along come the liberals... and they say, 'minorities are just people, like us'. Sure, minorities are people; people, not angels. Sure, they're like us - but not exactly like us; that's the all-too-familiar state of liberal hysteria, in which you begin to kid yourself you honestly cannot see any difference between a Negro and a Swede [...]

So lets face it, minorities are people who probably look and act and think differently from us, and have faults we don't have. We may dislike the way they look and act, and we may hate their faults. And it's better if we admit to disliking and hating them, than if we try to smear out feelings over with pseudo-liberal sentimentality [...]

But the worst of it is, we now run into another liberal heresy. Because the persecuting majority is vile, says the liberal, therefore the persecuted minority must be stainlessly pure. Can't you see what nonsense that is? What's to prevent the bad from being persecuted by the worse?"

--Christopher Isherwood, 'A Single Man'

(There is something religious here, like responses in church; a reaffirmation of faith in the basic American dogma, that it is, always, a Good Morning.)

--Christopher Isherwood, 'A Single Man'

"Someone has to ask you a question," George continues, meaningly, "before you can answer it. But it's seldom you find anyone who'll ask the right questions. Most people aren't that much interested -"

Christopher Isherwood, 'A Single Man'

"We are all of us more or less echoes, repeating involuntarily the virtues, the defects, the movements, and the characters of those among whom we live".

--Joseph Joubert

Doubt thou the stars are fire

Doubt that the sun doth move

Doubt truth to be a liar

But never doubt I love

--William Shakespeare, 'Hamlet'

"'We had fine notions then, didn't we?' And then, with a rush, 'Oh Ashley, nothing has turned out as we expected!'

'It never does', he said. 'Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect. We take what we get and are thankful it's no worse than it is'.

--Margaret Mitchell, 'Gone with the Wind'

"That's what empathy does- it calls us all to task, the conservative and the liberal, the powerful and the powerless, the oppressed and the oppressor. We are all shaken out of our complacency. We are forced beyond our limited vision.
Noone is exempt from the call to find common ground.
Of course, in the end a sense of mutual understanding isn't enough. After all, talk is cheap; empathy must be acted upon. When I was a community organiser back in the eighties, I would often challenge neighbourhood leaders by asking them where they put their time, energy and money. Those are the true tests of what we value, I'd tell them, regardless of what we like to tell ourselves. If we aren't willing to pay a price for our values, if we aren't willing to make some sacrifices in order to realise them, then we should ask ourselves whether we truly believe in them at all".

--Barack Obama, 'The Audacity of Hope'

"Just think about what a real education for these children would involve. It would start by giving a child an understanding of himself, his world, his culture, his community. That's the starting point of any educational process. That's what makes a child hungry to learn - the promise of being part of something, of mastering his environment. But for the black child, everything's turned upside down. From day one, what's he learning about? Someone else's history. Someone else's culture. Not only that, this culture he's supposed to learn is the same culture that's systematically rejected him, denied his humanity".

--Barack Obama, 'Dreams from my Father'

"But I'll tell you a terrible secret - Are you listening to me? There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. Don;t you know that?"

--J.D. Salinger, 'Franny and Zooey'

'Don't you want to join us?' I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffeehouse that was already almost deserted. 'No, I don't', I said.

-Kafka

The happiness of being with people.

-Kafka

-- in 'Franny and Zooey', J.D. Salinger

"You can always tell a real friend; when you've made a fool of yourself, he doesn't feel you've done a permanent job."

The experience of a poem is the experience of a moment and of a lifetime. It is very much like our intenser experiences of other human beings. There is a first, or an early moment which is unique, of shock and surprise, even of terror (Ego dominus tuus); a moment which can never be forgotten, but which is never repeated integrally; and yet which would become destitute of significance if it did not survive in a larger whole of experience; which survives inside a deeper and a calmer feeling.

- T.S.Eliot, on Dante.

“Solitude begets the original, the risky and unfamiliar beauty, begets poetry. But solitude also begets the perverse, the disproportionate, the absurd and illict”.
- Death in Venice, Thomas Mann

For it is a peculiarity of persons who lead rich emotional lives and who (as the saying is) live intensely and with a wild poetry, that they read all kinds of meanings into comparatively simple actions, especially the actions of other people, who do not live intensely and with a wild poetry. Thus you may find them weeping passionately on their bed, and be told that you- and you alone- are the cause because you said that awful thing to them at lunch.

--Stella Gibbons, 'Cold Comfort Farm'

'Goodbye. Don't forget to feed the parrot!', shrieked Flora, who disliked this prolongation of the ceremony of saying farewell, as every civilised traveller must.

'What parrot?' they all shrieked back from the fast-receding platform, just as they were meant to do.

But it was too much trouble to reply. Flora contented herself with muttering, 'Oh, any parrot, bless you all'...

--Stella Gibbons, 'Cold Comfort Farm'

Kumar: You're worthless.

Harold: I'm not... worthwhile.

It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits- like becoming a prime minister or a millionaire, winning a war, seducing beautiful women, flying through the stratosphere or landing on the moon. First -rate pursuits, involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding - inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napolean, a Churchill, a Roosevelt can feel themselves to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, a Blake. Understanding is forever unattainable.

--Malcolm Muggeridge.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Malcolm_Muggeridge

Mad Girl's Love Song

Where are the people?” resumed the little prince at last. “It’s a little lonely in the desert…”
“It is lonely when you’re among people, too,” said the snake.

LE PETIT PRINCE, ANTOINE DE SAINT EXUPERY

Action is transitory - a step, a blow

The motion of a muscle - this way or that -

'tis done and in the aftervacancy

We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed;

Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,

And shares the nature of infinity

--William Wordsworth, 'The Borderers'

"Such a head! - Would to heaven! my enemies only saw the inside of it!"

--Laurence Sterne, 'The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy'

"but let us be merry and give our minds to pleasure,

for a man may be sad whenever he wishes"

--'Gawain and the Green Knight'

"For it is really too sad that in life it should be as it is in chess, where one false move may force us to resign the game, but with the difference that we can start no second game, no return-match."

Freud, 'Thoughts for the Times on War and Death'

Listen to the newborn infant's cry in the hour of birth - see the death struggles in the final hour - and then declare whether what begins and ends in this way can be intended to be enjoyment.

What is reflection? Simply to reflect on these two questions: How did I get into this and this and how do I get out of it again, how does it end?

Kierkegaard, quoted by Al Alvarez, 'The Savage God'

e quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle

"I'm just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else's. I'm sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be something interesting. It's disgusting".

--J.D. Salinger, 'Franny and Zooey'

"Lets just try and have a marvellous time this weekend. I mean try not to analyse everything to death, for once. Especially me. I love you".

--J.D. Salinger, 'Franny and Zooey'

Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I’m one of them.

--RAY BRADBURY, 'Dandelion wine'

boot

"It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting"

--Paolo Coehlo, 'The Alchemist'

About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

--Ernest Hemingway, 'Death in the Afternoon'

"Considerate la vostra semenza

Fatti non foste a viver come bruti

Ma per seguir virtute e canonscenza"

--[Ulysses] Dante Aligheri, 'Inferno'

And i couldn't see the road for the cars or the sky for the stars

--Christiana Spens, 'The Wrecking Ball'

Poetry is a game of loser-takes-all

--Ferdinand/'Pierrot', 'Pierrot le Fou'

Idealization is very moving; it is also very false. It allows profound self-deceptions, at both the individual and the social level. Literature does not make us better, it does not make us worse; the study of it does not make us better, it does not make us worse. It only confirms what we are already.

--Harold Bloom, in conversation with Imre Salunsinsky

Changing the world is good for those who want their names in books. But being happy, that is for those who write their names in the lives of others, and hold the hearts of others as the treasure most dear.

CHILDREN OF THE MIND, ORSON SCOTT CARD

If you don’t want anyone to know about your existence, you might as well kill yourself. You’re taking up space, air.

A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS, DAVE EGGERS

"The trouble with my generation is that we all think we're fucking geniuses. Making something isn't good enough for us, and neither is selling something, or teaching something, or even just doing something; we have to be something".

--Nick Hornby, 'A Long Way Down'

"Drink and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die (but alas we never do!)"

--Dorothy Parker

I’ve about decided that’s the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you’re a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench

I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.

FEAR OF FLYING, ERICA JONG

You don’t understand women. They don’t admire you half so much as you admire yourselves.

MIDDLEMARCH, GEORGE ELIOT

'When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves'

--Chuck Palhunik, 'Invisible Monsters'

Yesterday you asked me what the purpose of life is. I’ve thought about that ever since. I think it’s to do good no matter what life throws at you, to not let the pain turn you bitter.

JUST ONE WISH, JANETTE RALLISON

'Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss. It is necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live'.

--Alexandre Dumas, 'The Count of Monte Cristo'

When in his heightened melancholia, he describes himself as petty, egoistic, dishonest, lacking in independence, one whose sole aim has been to hide the weaknesses of his own nature, we only wonder why a man has to be ill before he can be accessible to a truth of this kind.

--Freud, 'Mourning and Melancholia'

words, words, etc

"Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart..."

-Troilus, 'Troilus and Cressida'

Too bright for me, darkens descends
Oh well I'm not well again and once more darkness it descends
The ground is falling under me
And I cant find the means to leave

--Laura Marling, 'Darkness Descends'

its funny how the first chords that you come to
are the minor notes that come to serenade you
it's hard to accept yourself as someone
you don't desire
as someone you don't want to be

--Laura Marling, 'Rambling Man'

At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life - the outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.

-- Kate Chopin, 'The Awakening'

)))))

I’m the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant.

--Elizabeth Wurtzel, 'Prozac Nation'

paralysis

Sometimes I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.

-- Evelyn Waugh, 'Brideshead Revisited'

isn't it... don't you think?

The ironist spends her time worrying about the possibility that she has been initiated into the wrong tribe, taught to play the wrong language game. She worries that the process of socialisation which turned her into a human being by giving her a language may have given her the wrong language, and so turned her into the wrong kind of human being. But she cannot give a criterion of wrongness.

--Richard Rorty, 'Contingency, Irony and Solidarity'

just too good

He who has a contempt for [poetry] cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.

*

Many people suppose poetry is something to be found only in books, contained in lines of ten syllables, with like endings; but wherever there is a sense of beauty or power or harmony, as in the motion of a wave of the sea, in the growth of a flower, that 'spreads its sweet leaves to the air, and dedicates its beauty to the sun' -- there is poetry, in its birth.

*

Fear is poetry, hope is poetry, love is poetry, hatred is poetry; contempt, jealousy, remorse, admiration, wonder, pity, despair, or madness, are all poetry. Poetry is that fine particle within us that expands, refines, rarefies, raises our whole being; without it, 'man's life is poor as beasts'.

*

The child is a poet, in fact, when he first plays at hide-and-seek, or repeats the story of Jack the Giant-Killer; the shepherd boy is a poet when he first crowns his mistress with a garland of flowers; the countryman when he stops to look at the rainbow; the city-apprentice when he gazes after the Lord Mayor's show; the miser when he hugs his gold; the courtier who builds his hopes upon a smile; the savage, who paints his idol with blood; the slave, who worships a tyrant, or the tyrant, who fancies himself a god- the vain, the ambitious, the proud, the choleric man, the hero and the coward, the beggar and the king, the rich and the poor, the young and the old, all live in a world of their own making; and the poet does no more than describe what all others think and act. If his art is folly and madness, it is folly and madness at second-hand.

*

Homer has celebrated the anger of Achilles: but was not the hero as mad as the poet? Plato banished the poets from his Commonwealth, lest their description of the natural man should spoil his mathematical man, who was to be without passions and affections, who was neither to laugh nor weep, to feel sorrow or anger, to be cast down nor elated by anything. This was a chimera, however, which never existed but in the brain of the inventor; and Homer's poetical world has outlived Plato's philosophical Republic.

*

The light of poetry is not only a direct, but a reflected light, that while it shews us the object, throws a sparkling radiance on all around it: the flame of the passions, communicated to the imagination, reveals to us with a flash of lightning, the inmost recesses of our thought, and penetrates our whole being.

*

Poetry puts a spirit of life and motion into the universe. It describes the flowing, not the fixed.

*

The poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained within itself, that it impatient of all limit, that (as flame bends to flame) strives to link itself to some other image of kindred beauty or grandeur...

*

It is not... the difference between fiction and reality that solves the difficulty. Children are satisfied with the stories of ghosts and witches in plain prose...

*

We are as fond of indulging our violent passions as of reading a description of those of others... The sense of power is as strong a principle in the mind as the love of pleasure. Objects of terror and pity exercise the same despotic control over it as those of love or beauty. It is natural to hate as to love, to despise as to admire, to express our hatred or contempt, as our love or admiration.

--William Hazlitt, 'On Poetry in General'

"To discover the fundamental problem common to mankind I must ask myself what my fundamental problem is [...] A work of art is the expression of an incommunicable reality that one tries to communicate ... That is its paradox and its truth".

--Ionesco.

abracadabra

Words and Magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power. By words one of us can give to another the greatest happiness or bring about utter despair.

--Freud, 'Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis'

The most powerful thing in the poet, which blows the good and evil spirit into his works, is precisely the unconscious. So a great one, like Shakespeare, will enfold and present jewels which he could no more see than he could his own heart in his own body… If one dares to say anything about the unconscious and unfathomable, then one can only seek to determine its existence, not its depths.

--Jean Paul Richter

How excellent, that it is so, and that the deepest depths of our soul are hidden in the night! Our poor thinking organ would certainly not be able to seize every stimulus, the seed of every sensation, in its ultimate elements, or to hear aloud such a soaring ocean of dark waves, without shuddering with anxiety and in fear and cowardice letting the rudder go from its hands.

JG van Herder

sale

We are like shop windows in which we are continually arranging, concealing or illuminating the supposed qualities other ascribe to us - in order to deceive ourselves.

--Nieztsche, 'Daybreak'

sunset, according to Dr Johnson

"the gentle coruscations of declining day"

When we examine our own lives, we have so many obstacles to correct vision, so many motives to blindness. The 'vulgar heat' of jealousy and personal interest comes between us and the loving perception of each particular. A novel, just because it is not our own life, places us in a moral position that is favourable for perception and shows us what it would be like to take up that position in life.

This is just to say

I have eaten

the plums

that were in 

the icebox  

and which 

you were probably

saving 

for breakfast  

Forgive me 

they were delicious

 so sweet 

and so cold

-- William Carlos Williams

hazlet on hamlitt

Whoever has become thoughtful and melancholy through his own mishaps or those of others; whoever has borne about with him the clouded brow of reflection, and thought himself 'too much i' the sun', whoever has seen the golden lamp of day dimmed by envious mists rising in his own breast and could find in the world before him only a dull blank with nothing left remarkable in it; whoever has known 'the pangs of despised love, the insolence of office, or the spurns which patient merit of the unworthy takes'; he who has felt his mind sink within him, and sadness cling to his heart like a malady; who has had his hopes blighted and his youth staggered by the apparition of strange things; who cannot be well at east while he sees evil hovering near him like a spectre; whose powers of action have been eaten up by thought, - he to whom the universe seems infinite and himself nothing; whose bitterness of soul makes him careless of consequences, and who goes to a play as his best resource to shove off, to a second remove, the evils of life by a mock representation of them: this is the true Hamlet.

...

"That which for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking"

--Nietzsche, 'The Twilight of the Idols'

why

"I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough"

--Harold Bloom, 'Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human'

zhongguoren

…a sort of reticence in meta-language, in the great metaphysical and/or philosophical systems… responsible, perhaps, for something in the way that ancient and modern Chinese have of explaining their problems, which often is disconcerting to us.

Rather than proceeding to an explanation which, for us, is the only logical one – which seeks the causes, makes the deductions, specifies the motivations, appearance and essences, and at the same time foresees the consequences of an event – an operation which derives from the principle of a logical, metaphysical causality – the Chinese give us a ‘structuralist’ or ‘warring’ (contradictory) portrait. Behind the event itself there appears a combination or an association that bears the seed of the overthrow of the previous order; a battle between good and evil, two-faced people, persecutions, conspiracies, sensational turns of event.

As if the causal, deterministic, metaphysical logic had crumbled before the traumatic occurrence whose advent we question, but without losing the symbolic level, the Chinese-speaking individual describes this event as if he were speaking of a game, a war, a combinatorium… an aesthetic mode of reasoning… By eliminating straight away the problem of an objective truth, it shifts people to a symbolic situation.

--Julia Kristeva, About Chinese Women

Are we the victims of a language that we cannot change, that predates us, and that is primary and autonomous, constraining and predetermining the way we percieve and feel, or does language add a dimension of freedom to our existence by allowing us to reformulate our experience?

--Marie Jaans Kurrik, 'Literature and Negation'

rain-globe

But man cannot live in chaos. The animals can. To the animal, all is chaos, only there are a few recurring motions and aspects within the surge. And the animal is content. But man is not. Man must wrap himself in a vision, make a house of apparent form and stability, fixity. In his terror of chaos, he begins by putting up an umbrella between himself and the everlasting chaos. Then he paints the underside of his umbrella like a firmament. Then he parades around, lives, and dies under his umbrella. Bequeathed to his descendants, the umbrella becomes a dome, a vault, and men at last begin to feel that something is wrong.

--DH Lawrence

in out in out [ask matilda]

How do you describe people who dont think - the scientist, essentially, the person who just wants to grasp the nutshell and not to lean into the infinite abyss...?  

An expansion out from from the neat confines of a perfectly epitomised meaning is the natural movement of thought. As Conrad writes in Heart of Darkness: 'The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But [...] [to Marlow] the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine'.  [....]   It is easy to misconstrue this idea of space and place, as suggested in Hamlet's words: 'I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space', and W.S. Graham wrote in a letter that poetry must not 'hand us out a little nutshell truth which we have pleasure in agreeing with'.  [...]  The 'bad dreams' which counteract this happy illusion for Hamlet are his awakening into consciousness, an escape into the external; in this way, poetry is like a flurry of bad dreams; brooding in the 'nutshell' that metaphor might imply, is the bad dream of instability in extended, infinite space.  Paterson's concept of metaphor as creating 'a new unity in the language' is of a unity brought about by drawing attention to the disunity of everyday literal and metaphorical language. It is an act of understanding created out of exposing the limiting enclosure of the firmament, similar to D.H. Lawrence's concept of the mind's umbrella. [...]

'Silent Love'

There's no vocabulary

For love within a family, love that's lived in

But not looked at, love within the light of which

All else is seen, the love within which

All other love finds speech.

This love is silent.

--T.S. Eliot

If you ever think a day is fine, you weren’t paying attention

--Magic Molly, 23.3.10

[ pause ]

There are two silences. One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed. This speech is speaking of a language locked beneath it. That is its continual reference. The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its place. When true silence falls we are still left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.

We have heard many times that tired, grimy phrase: 'failure of communication' … and this phrase has been fixed to my work quite consistently. I believe the contrary. I think that we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else's life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.

I am not suggesting that no character in a play can never say what he in fact means. Not at all. I have found that there invariably does come a moment when this happens, when he says something, perhaps, which he has never said before. And where this happens, what he says is irrevocable, and can never be taken back.

--Harold Pinter, 'Writing for the Theatre'

"we talked about the nature of good until almost one!"

It seems as if the highest efforts of the most intelligent people produce a negative result; one cannot honestly be anything...

Why were the gifted people the most barren? Why were the most stimulating of friendships also the most deadening? Why was it all so negative? Why did these young men make one feel that one could not honestly be anything?

--Virginia Woolf, 'Moments of Being'

Old Bloomsbury

"No" was the most frequent reply. "No, I haven't seen it"; "No, I haven't been there". Or simply, "I don't know". The conversation languished in a way that would have been impossible in the drawing room at Hyde Park Gate. Yet the silence was difficult, not dull. It seemed as if the standard of what was worth saying had risen so high that it was better not to break it unworthily.

-- Virginia Woolf, 'Moments of Being'

Gemma speaks,

How to stop people in their tracks, and make them think. Only if you're starving, if it's your son lying in your arms, or you think he might be in that discarded pile of mutilated bodies, or there's no milk in your breast and the baby's crying, or the radiation is leaking into your child's lungs, or the lead or the nitrates or the, or the, or the and all the while skirts get longer, skirts get shorter, skirts get longer, skirts get shorter, poetry is written, the news is read, I buy a different butter at the store and have my hair permed, straightened, coloured, cut, lengthened, all the while my hair keeps growing, I throw away all my skirts [...] I'm on the pill, I'm off the pill, I'm on the pill, I'm off the pill. I'm listening to jazz, swing, jazz, swing, I'm getting my posters framed. I'm telling my women's group everything. Im protesting. I'm protesting. I've covered my wall with postcards, with posters, with postcards, with posters. No this. Out them. In theses. Yes those. No this. Out them. In these. Yes those. The rows. The rows with my friends, my lovers. What were they about? What did they change? The fact is, the facts are, nothing is changed. Nothing has been done. There is neither rhyme nor reason, just tears, tears, people's pain, people's rage, their aggression. And silence.

Look, already its happening here, the weight of words, the torrent, all the words seep into each other, the rage, the protest all clotting together, sit and listen to the wireless and run the wheel of the tuner, spin the dial, hear them all at it, in all languages, pouring out. This is, after all, our first punishment - Babel - saying so much to say nothing. Doing so much to say nothing. Because the power to arrest, to stop us short in our tracks, what does that? (Pause.) But the silence, listen, how rich it is, how pregnant, how full...

-- Anthony Mingella, 'Cigarettes and Chocolate'

that's it and that's that

All we're talking about, finally is what is real? What is real? There's only one reality, you know. You can interpret reality in various ways. But there's only one. And if that reality is thousands of people being tortured to death at this very moment and hundreds and thousands of megatons of nuclear bombs standing there waiting to go off at this very moment, then that's it and that's that. It has to be faced.

-- Harold Pinter, in conversation with Nicholas Hern