"Nice going, God!" [Cat's Cradle, pt. 1]

"God got lonesome.

So God said to some mud, 'Sit up!'

'See all I've made!' said God, 'the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.'

And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.

Lucky me, lucky mud.

I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.

Nice going, God!

Nobody could have done it but you, God! I certainly couldn't have.

I feel very unimportant compared to You.

The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around.

I got so much, and most mud got so little."

- Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

Under the Sun

"So I congratulated the dead who are already dead more than the living who are still living. But better off than both of them is the one who has never existed, who has never seen the evil activity that is done under the sun."

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- Ecclesiastes 4:2, 3

Alarms and Discursions

"Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."

- G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions

Buck up.

"Buck up... It's only death, all said and done. We should have to die someday, you know."

- C.S. Lewis, Perelandra

Highland Dancing

Source I could spend hours here.

A pleasant, simple tune...

"A fiddler on the roof... Sounds crazy, no? But in our little village of Anatevka, you might say that every one of us is a fiddler on the roof, trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking his neck. It isn't easy."

- Joseph Stein, The Fiddler on the Roof

A Day in the Life

"...and though the news was rather sad, I just had to laugh. I saw the photograph. He blew his mind out in a car. He didn't notice that the lights had changed. A crowd of people stood and stared. They'd seen his face before, nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords."

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-The Beatles, 'A Day in the Life'

How many people does one know?

"We know but a few men, and a great many coats and breeches."

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-Henry David Thoreau

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The more one thinks on this, the more it is understood.

Now: VERY Fantastic

"We thought if we lasted for two or three years, that would be fantastic."

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-Ringo Starr of The Beatles

...could not be truer.

toothpastefordinner.com

All That is Gold Does Not Glitter

"All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes the fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king."

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- 'All That is Gold Does Not Glitter', J.R.R. Tolkien

"...to be in some way inferior."

"The claim to equality, outside political fields, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior."

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-C.S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters

Where is Everybody?

"Up there, in the vastness of space, in the void that is the sky, up there is an enemy known as isolation. It sits there in the stars waiting, waiting with the patience of eons, forever waiting... in the Twilight Zone."

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-The Twilight Zone, Episode 1, 'Where is Everybody?'

The Secret Sits

"We dance around a ring and suppose,

But the secret sits in the middle and knows."

-Robert Frost

"So it goes."

"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment it gone, it is gone forever. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people,

'So it goes.'"

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-Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

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Take what you will from this.