[quote]theBeth wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
[quote]theBeth wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
[quote]theBeth wrote:
“What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.” [/quote]
My two favorite Emerson quotes, back to back:
“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
“Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
[/quote]
I relate to the first quote, I can see why it might be your favorite.[/quote]
Another female friend of mine, who knows me better than most, sent me this quote of Rushdie’s, said it reminded her of me. Not sure if I should be flattered or concerned.
"For a long while I have believed – this is perhaps my version of Sir Darius Xerxes Cama’s belief in a fourth function of outsideness – that in every generation there are a few souls, call them lucky or cursed, who are simply born not belonging, who come into the world semi-detached, if you like, without strong affiliation to family or location or nation or race; that there may even be millions, billions of such souls, as many non-belongers as belongers, perhaps; that, in sum, the phenomenon may be as “natural” a manifestation of human nature as its opposite, but one that has been mostly frustrated, throughout human history, by lack of opportunity.
"And not only by that: for those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainly, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel, we hide our secret identities beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the belongers’ seal of approval. But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds (because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves), we soar, we fly, we flee.
“And in the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks. What we forbid ourselves we pay good money to watch, in a playhouse or a movie theatre, or to read about between the secret covers of a book. Our libraries, our palaces of entertainment tell the truth. The tramp, the assassin, the rebel, the thief, the mutant, the outcast, the delinquent, the devil, the sinner, the traveller, the gangster, the runner, the mask: if we did not recognize in them our least-fulfilled needs, we would not invent them over and over again, in every place, in every language, in every time.”[/quote]
So, you are the dusty foot philosopher…the embodiment of our disowned parts. The unconventional nonconformist. You blaze your own solitary path?[/quote]
“I’m a picker
I’m a grinner
I’m a lover
And I’m a sinner
playin’ my music in the sun…
I’m a joker
I’m a smoker
I’m a mid-night toker
I get my lovin’ on the run.”