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Boston Public

Boston Public (2000–2004) was a television series, created by David E. Kelley, about the personal and professional lives of teachers working at a public high school in Boston.

Chapter One [1.1]

 * Scott Guber: Where's Ms. Hendricks?
 * Student: We think she's dead, sir.
 * Scott Guber: And why do you think that, Ms. Washington?
 * [Student points to words on a chalkboard: GONE TO KILL MYSELF, HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY!!!]

 * Steven Harper: We do not help kids one by one here. Too many of them, too few of us. We serve masses, hoping more of them make it than don't. And our best results, like it or not, come with policy.

 * Student: Jefferson used to sleep with his slaves. The book don't say nothin' about that. They don't even say how he even had slaves. Washington neither. So I don't see why I should bust my black ass reading about a bunch of lies.
 * Harvey Lipschultz: Well, you see Mr. Jackson, my job is to see that you get your black ass into college. And whether these things in these books be lies or not, your achievement tests that you will be taking are standardized. And you'll have to know all these untruths in order for you to pass them, and how many slaves Jefferson had sex with will not be on the test. And if you fail American History, Mr. Jackson, you'll be sitting here again next year.  And you'll have to listen all over again to what my shriveled, white, Jewish ass has to say.

 * Mr. Harrelson: You told my son that giving him the ball is not the answer. Best he learn that now. Best he learn that in eighth grade, or seventh grade, or even sooner, don't you think, Ms. Davis? Now maybe I failed some things as his dad, but this school failed him, too. These teachers here kept promoting him, didn't they? This school never got him the message. And now you're trying to send it? Now when college scouts are coming, now when football is about to deliver him an education at the University, now you people want to rise up and deliver him the message that athletics ain't everything?

Chapter Two [1.2]

 * Harvey Lipschultz: All through history, when men look at women, they want to have sex. Now, God did this on purpose to ensure the survival of the human species. And he also gave women lumps, known as breasts, to inspire in man the penile urge to procreate. Now, this was very good for mankind, but not for womankind. Now, how could she succeed in this world, and how could she be respected for all her values, when men just want to mount her? Research eventually showed that it was those dangling bouncing breasts that cause special excitement to the man's blood flow. It was determined that the brassiere could stop this dangling, bouncing motion. The man would be less likely to objectify the woman and she would have a fighting chance at equality. You must harness your bosoms in order to squash the discrimination by the male gonads. This country can never maximize its potential until you can achieve equality. That's why I must make a rule, right here, and right now: wear a bra, for the good of the country.

 * Dana Poole: I'm not getting expelled. Guber decided to give me a three-day suspension... Did you have anything to do with it?
 * Harry Senate: Listen to me. Whether or not I did, here's how it's gonna be. You come to me ever again, ever, and try to extort me for anything, I don't care if it's even a hall pass, I'm going to Harper and Guber myself and I'm going to tell them everything. You got that?
 * Dana Poole: Why would you do that?
 * Harry Senate: Because I made a mistake with you, Dana, and I'm not going to make another one.

 * Superintendant Marsha Shinn: "Dragon Lady"? Is that what they call me?
 * Steven Harper: Only when you're in the room.

 * Harvey Lipschultz: My granddaughter Karen, who I thought was you for a second, is just as mischievous with her computer. You two would probably get along.
 * Cheryl Holt: Does she go here?
 * Harvey Lipschultz: No. She lives in Weymouth. Hardly ever leaves the house.  Always with her computer. Knows how to make those virus things that make the websites crash. I know very little about those things. But she wouldn't stop at anything.

 * Lauren Davis: Three siblings. Two are doctors, the other's an investment banker. And to my parents, I'm the one who didn't make anything of herself. I can still hear my father's words: "What a waste, Lauren. You are so smart. You could actually be somebody." Something we battle every day is disrespect. We get it from the kids because it comes from the parents. And look at what we make!
 * Steven Harper: You know what your problem is, Lauren? You don't have any idea how powerful you are. Things you say in that classroom some of those kids are going to remember fifty years from now, even if you've forgotten by the sound of the next bell. Do you like being a teacher?
 * Lauren Davis: I love it.
 * Steven Harper: Then what are you complaining about?

Chapter Three [1.3]

 * Harvey Lipschultz: [to Marla] The kids are already afraid of you because they think you have mental problems. I mean that as a compliment.

 * Harry Senate: The assignment was the read the book. Did anybody read the book?
 * [Silence.]
 * Harry Senate: Jamal, what do you want to be when you grow up?
 * Jamaal: Not a teacher.
 * Harry Senate: You know, as a teacher, it would be inappropriate for me to tell you that you're a total screw-up. So what I want you to do is go home and ask your father, as a favor to me, to tell you that you're a total screw-up. I bet you can't wait to get out into the real world because you're all going to be rich. Companies are going to pay you a ton of money to sit there like lumps and do nothing all day. I want all my books back. Just leave them right here on my desk on your way out because, well, unlike a mind, a book is a terrible thing to waste.

 * Kevin Riley: Think before you speak, Harvey.
 * Marla Hendricks: Then he'd be mute.

 * Harvey Lipschultz: [to the football players] When I was a young boy, there was this baseball player. And the players didn't want him to play because he was different. But when he finally did make it into the game, they found that he could hit and run and catch better than all of them. His name was Jackie Robinson. And he paved the way for the black man to get into the game of baseball, making it a better game. What if it were to turn out that this homosexual could run faster, hit harder and throw that football straighter? We won't know that. We won't know that unless that first team of courage invites him to join the game.  And I would like to think that that team of courage lives right here at Winslow High. Gentlemen, there is nothing more American than football. Be proud. Welcome the gay linebacker into your shower.

 * Marla Hendricks: [to the school board] Let me tell you something, let me tell all of you something. The reason I've had it is because I have to go into a room day after day after damn day and try to break through to a bunch of damn kids who don't want to listen, don't want to learn, and don't want to give me the decency of being quiet. Mr. Senate shot off a gun? I woulda rolled in a big cannon if I knew where to get one. I'd have tried anything. And you show me a teacher who doesn't almost lose his or her mind sometimes, and I'll show you a teacher who's not trying. I can show you some parents who aren't. You send them off to school thinking: job's done. It's up to the teachers now. Well, it doesn't work that way. You got to get in on this, too. Kids coming in every day singing that jingle: those who can't do, teach. They get that from their parents! Well, let me tell you, we're in there doing every damn day, and a lot of the doing we do is parenting! You want to compare failures? Step right up! Who's first?

Chapter Four [1.4]

 * Kevin Riley: [discussing Louisa Fenn's inviting Buttle out on a date] But do you want to go out with her?
 * Milton Buttle: She's female. She's breathing. I'm going through a non-picky phase.

 * Juan Figgis: These history books don't talk about Puerto Rico. Why is that?
 * Harry Senate: Cause we have you to talk about it.

Chapter Five [1.5]

 * Lauren Davis: [on counseling freshmen on birth control] I started preaching abstinence. I'm telling you I felt the habit growing on my head as the words left my mouth.

 * Marla Hendricks: I have four cheeks, Harry. Pick one and bite it.

 * Marla Hendricks: Are you gonna say grace?
 * Harry Senate: Yep. I'm going to thank God that I'm not you.

Chapter Six [1.6]

 * Harry Senate: Lauren, you and I are a disaster.
 * Lauren Davis: I know.
 * Harry Senate: As disasters go, it'd probably be one of the better ones.
 * [They kiss.]
 * Harry Senate: I mean, it's really not a good idea.
 * Lauren Davis: I know.
 * [They kiss again.]

Chapter Seven [1.7]

 * Harry Senate: You know, I doubt this is the first time that one teacher has kissed another.
 * Student: No, it's just... You know, with you...
 * Other student: You're usually kissing students.

 * Harry Senate: Anyone I suppose could contribute to a shelter or help the needy, but it takes a true American to dedicate himself to firearms. And you know what? We need people like you. Our country's getting a bad rep just because we kill each other. Well, that's manly... shooting people. United States, this is were men live. Australia — all their stupid bragging about how tough they are in the outback. They get about... 15 gun homicides a year. What the hell is that? We get ten thousand. The Japanese are even more pathetic. In 1999, for kids between 15 and 19, they didn't have one handgun murder, not one! We had over five thousand! Our teenagers are tough, but it can't happen unless we get the guns out there into their hands. And for that we need committed, good people like all of you. Look at these idiots in Washington who think it's wrong for teenagers to have assault rifles. And the stupid Democrats think we should have ten-day waiting periods. What happens if you need to kill somebody today? Next thing the government will try to crack down on incest and we won't be able to breed future NRA members. I mean, we are talking about the toothless illiterates that make this country great. This is America. Get a gun!

Chapter Eight [1.8]

 * Steven Harper: Last day of school before vacation. What's the word for it?
 * Scott Guber: Halleluah!

 * Lisa Grier: Is this just about sex with you?
 * Milton Buttle: Honestly, no. I can see you as a potential ex-wife.

 * Milton Buttle: Kevin, you know me. I'm not an impulsive person. I pencil in trips to the bathroom on my day planner.

 * Marla Hendricks: Harvey, are you all right?
 * Harvey Lipschultz: Ooh, I think I'm gonna die. I feel so warm and fuzzy. What can do that to a person besides death?

 * Lisa Grier: [to Milton] I don't go to Harvard University. I go to Winslow High. I'm a senior.

Chapter Nine [1.9]

 * Lauren Davis: I wanna go dancing. Women have sex with men to go dancing.
 * Harry Senate: Men go dancing with women to have sex and we've already done that. So why do we need to go dancing?

 * Scott Guber: Mr. Senate, your class started ten minutes ago.
 * Harry Senate: Excellent. Usually they wait 'til I get here.

 * Scott Guber: Mr. Senate, is there anything you do not find humoring?
 * Harry Senate: Your tie?

 * Steven Harper: Why are you here?
 * Harvey Lipschultz: Because vice-president "Hitler" has ordered me to stay here.

Chapter Ten [1.10]

 * Steven Harper: It doesn't offend you when he says it's his job to get your black ass into college?
 * Student: Not really.
 * Steven: Why not?
 * Student: Because he will. That man will get my black ass into college.

 * Marla Hendricks: [about Lipschultz] Is he a nut? A big one. A racist? Probably. But he doesn't come from hate and the kids know that.
 * Steven Harper: Well, a lot of bigotry here does come from hate, Marla, and his behavior helps foster it, even if it's unintentional. There's no such thing as a benign bigot.

 * Harvey Lipschultz: I know I'm old-fashioned, but am I a racist?
 * Marla Hendricks: Yes, Harvey, you are an old-fashioned racist.

 * Mr. Pierce: I don't know whether to hire a lawyer to sue you or leap across that desk and break your neck.
 * Mr. Lick: You'd have more success with a lawyer.

Chapter Eleven [1.11]

 * Jamaal: You know, Mr. Senate? I'm gonna tell you this because I feel like we have a relationship and we can be honest and stuff.
 * Harry Senate: Okay.
 * Jamaal: You really shouldn't try to tell jokes. You're not funny.
 * Harry Senate: All right.

 * Steven Harper: Did you talk to Tina?
 * Scott Guber: No, I thought I should perhaps bring you in on it since they think of me as a conservative fascist prude.

 * Harvey Lipschultz: Don't sell yourself short, Marla. You've got a lot to offer. If I were 40 years younger myself... and blind.
 * Marla Hendricks: Oh, if that's not the pot calling the kettle black.
 * Harvey Lipschultz: Why do you have to make everything about race?

 * Harry Senate: You do realize you'll officially be a grown-up.
 * Lauren Davis: Yes. I plan to eventually drag you into adult-hood too.

 * Joey: [to Lauren] You know, I suddenly remember why I left you. I was always afraid that one day you'd fall off that soapbox of yours and land on me.

Chapter Twelve [1.12]

 * Christine: I don't want to wrestle!
 * Kevin Riley: Why?
 * Christine: Look, I enjoyed it at first, but after awhile, rolling around the floor with a 200-pound sweating grunting pig who's trying to physically hurt me? The fun wears off.

Chapter Thirteen [1.13]

 * Harry Senate: It's just not like you to clam up.
 * Lauren Davis: Well, if you think I'm clam now, wait until we get into bed.

 * Lauren Davis: Do you really think that it is appropriate to motivate your students with the message that the smart kids get the pretty girls?
 * Jenna: I never said that.
 * Lauren Davis: Oh.
 * Jenna: What I said is, the smart kids get the girls with the good asses.
 * Lauren Davis: Oh.

 * Steven Harper: I understand you've had a tragedy with one of your partners and these aren't the happiest of times, but if you think you can intimidate me, not gonna happen.
 * Eleanor: You project nicely. You don't need to be in my face, but while you're here, look into my eyes. Do I look scared? And by the way, you're not better looking up close.
 * Susan: All right, enough with the chest thumping.

 * Marilyn Sudor: Marla's circulating a petition.
 * Kevin Riley: Great. It's nice to know I have the voice of insanity on my side.

Chapter Fourteen [1.14]

 * Scott Guber: Teaching is my calling, Steven, but it's never been my dream. Dreams are made of sterner stuff.
 * Steven Harper: That's ambition.
 * Scott Guber: Up there, that's a dream. And this experience, I think, will only make conspicuous how... how my life is utterly without song, I guess.

 * Lauren Davis: Steven, have you lost your mind?
 * Steven Harper: Why does that question keep popping up?

 * Harvey Lipschultz: Steven.
 * Steven Harper: What?
 * Harvey Lipschultz: I resign.
 * Steven Harper: Why?
 * Harvey Lipschultz: I'm a fossil.
 * Harry Senate: You're just figuring that out?
 * Steven Harper: Harry!

Chapter Fifteen [1.15]

 * Marilyn Sudor: We can win this competition without Tyronn. You guys are awesome. So, we'll get right back into it, and we'll be great, and nobody will get gum disease from bitin' anybody's ass.

 * Steven Harper: I'm not taking her side.
 * Tina: Then what are you doing?
 * Steven Harper: I'm covering my gigantic ass.

 * Lisa Grier: Don't tell me what to do, Harry.
 * Harry Senate: It's Mr. Senate to you.
 * Lisa Grier: No, I think it's Harry.
 * Harry Senate: You're a student!
 * Lisa Grier: Which gives me an excuse for all the stuff I pull. What's yours... Harry?

 * Louisa Fenn: [to Scott] Would you like me to make a list of all the people who don't like you?

Chapter Sixteen [1.16]

 * Marla Hendricks: I got to bed at night thinking of some prince who's gonna swoop in and take me to some exotic island and lick champagne off my naked self. It's my romanticized version, I guess, of wonder and magic. In the real world, my prince, my magic, it's you kids. And some days, when I see your faces go dead, all the wonder just drains out of me. That's all that was happening. I'm better now.

 * Harvey Lipschultz: It's Harry.
 * Lauren Davis: Harvey!
 * Harvey Lipschultz: You two are at odds.
 * Lauren Davis: We are not at odds.
 * Harvey Lipschultz: Call me crazy then.
 * Lauren Davis: Well, gee, I'd be the first to do that, wouldn't I?
 * Harvey Lipschultz: That was hurtful.

Chapter Seventeen [1.17]

 * Scott Guber: You're suspended, Mr. Connelly.
 * Student: Look, please! If I get suspended, my parents will kill me.
 * Scott Guber: Then perhaps this is goodbye as well. Retrieve your books. Be gone in one hour.

 * Scott Guber: Do I look like I'm stupid, Ms. Holt?
 * Sheryl Holt: Mr. Guber, if you keep asking those rhetorical questions, one day, somebody will respond, and the answer won't please you.

 * Harvey Lipschultz: The only reason people study Shakespeare is so they know Shakespeare, so they can walk around pretending that they're smarter then everybody else. It's arrogant. You want to be arrogant snobs, move to England, they love Shakespeare there. It's a nation full of arrogant sex-depraved perverts.

 * Lauren Davis: You okay?
 * Harry Senate: Oh, well, between us splitting up and me not owning a computer, I don't get to see you naked anymore.

 * Steven Harper: I can't do it. I got a mother wantin' me to fumigate buses. I got one teacher keepin' secrets that should get him fired, and another teacher who's an old senile bigot who definitely should be fired. I got a student teaching a course for which I'm going to get my ass dragged in front of the school committee, and another teacher appearing naked on a student web site. And I hear you're walkin' around suspending everybody in your path. Is that true?
 * Scott Guber: It is. It's been a good day.

Chapter Eighteen [1.18]

 * Harry Senate: Can we discuss your hair?
 * Patron: Hey, I'm not ashamed to be bald for your information. I just wear a disguise when I come to these places.
 * Harry Senate: Excellent. I bet in real life your teeth are straight too.

 * Scott Guber: What did you call me?
 * Darren: I called you a lot of things, but I finished up with "autocratic hack."

Chapter Nineteen [1.19]

 * Daniel: [to Lauren] Do you ever fantasize about your students fantasizing about you?

 * Scott Guber: Mr. Senate, I need a favor.
 * Harry Senate: Is it sexual?
 * Scott Guber: Why must you be depraved at every turn, Mr. Senate?
 * Harry Senate: It's in my character.

Chapter Twenty [1.20]

 * Scott Guber: [to Kevin Jackson] What does it say about how you think of yourself if you were to conclude the only reason I want you on the team is because of the color of your skin? Is that how you view yourself, Mr. Jackson? Are you going to assume the role of black victim every opportunity that comes your way? Every gain, every loss, will simply be the by-product of your ethnicity? Why don't you hustle off to your favorite tattoo parlor and have "woe" stamped onto your forehead. Let me tell you, Mr. Jackson, I have no use for victims on my team, no matter what they come in. You have a talent. It's that talent I'm trying to avail myself of. Forgive me for trying to recognize it in the face of your dogged determination not to.

 * Marla Hendricks: I know teachers are not supposed to have fun, but it is not against the law for us to smile every so often.

 * Louisa Fenn: [about Steven Harper] He's in love.
 * Marilyn Sudor: Really?
 * Louisa Fenn: Marie Ronning's mother. She came in to complain about her daughter sniffing bus fumes, now she's sniffing him.

Chapter Twenty-One [1.21]

 * Scott Guber: Did you bury me?
 * Harvey Lipschultz: Why would I do that, Scott?
 * Scott Guber: You buried me.
 * Harvey Lipschultz: Scott, I don't get many chances to get you the hell out of Winslow High. I didn't waste the opportunity.

Chapter Twenty-Two [1.22]

 * Kevin Jackson: [reciting his graduation speech] The truth is, I don't have any big message. I don't even have any dreams. A lot of my classmates, the same thing, no dreams. I think one reason for that, the idea of becoming adults, it isn't something we look forward to. We look around, we see our parents, our coaches, our teachers.... Who'd want to be them? Our parents mainly think about money, our coaches mainly think about winning, and our teachers... most of you look half-dead every day. Don't get me wrong, I admire anybody who can go to a place day after day after day tryin' to teach a bunch of us. But a lot of you are disillusioned, you don't get enough respect. Your days are too long, your checks are too small, and you get a little more dead with each passing day. And we see that, making us just a little more afraid day by day. Afraid of the future. And we got no dreams. The truth is, today's kids are disadvantaged. We didn't get to grow up with any Martin Luther Kings or Bobby Kennedys. They didn't make any Jackie Robinsons in our generation. Today's heroes, they're not presidents. Proud parents today say any kid might grow up to be Alan Greenspan. And we got no dreams. Despite all this, I'm standing up here to say there are heroes among us. Sometimes they're parents, sometimes they're classmates, like Christine Banks or Lisa Grier. Sometimes they're teachers. With me, Harvey Lipschultz. He's a bigot, but he never let me forget every day that I could be something. He took an interest in me. And Mr. Senate? He doesn't know it but he saved my life. There's been a few times I thought about just driving over that center line, but then he started the suicide club and I was too proud to join it. But just knowin' that there were other kids out there struggling with some of the same stuff I was... it helped me get by. Mr. Harper, who's here fightin' for us every day, with eyes that never go dead. When I look at him, I want to be a principal. I guess my big message for today is, heroes are in the grass sometimes. They're not always on billboards and magazine covers. You've gotta look for 'em, even when they stand right in front of you. So, do that. Let's live our lives tryin' to do that. Spot 'em, point 'em out to your kids. Maybe there's dreams out there too. And now, I'll ask all of you to applaud because I'm finished.

 * Isaac: I admit I was wrong.
 * Scott Guber: In home-schooling your son?
 * Isaac: In thinking you couldn't possibly become a bigger ass. It seems I've never been more mistaken.
 * Scott Guber: Your son does not attend Winslow High. Accordingly, he may not participate in Friday's commencement proceedings.
 * Isaac: I'll try not leave a footprint as I go over your head. I know how you are about your hair.

Chapter Twenty-Four [2.2]

 * Scott Guber: Do you know who Dimitri Schostakovich is?
 * Steven Harper: Scott, I've told you. I like Basketball. I don't really follow Hockey.

Chapter Twenty-Five [2.3]

 * Scott Guber: Keep your voice down.
 * Steven Harper: We're alone.
 * Scott Guber: Louisa listens, the little snoop.
 * Louisa Fenn: I heard that.

 * Danny Hanson: Can I ask you something? You can tell me if it's a tacky question, but I really gotta know.
 * Ronnie Cooke: Okay.
 * Danny Hanson: As a lawyer, how much money did you make?
 * Ronnie Cooke: That's a tacky question.
 * Danny Hanson: Well, that's not really a deterrent for me actually.

Chapter Twenty-Six [2.4]

 * Danny Hanson: I'm gonna let you in on a little secret. You know the way we tell every student you can be whatever you want to be if you set your mind to it? That's a big lie. Most kids have limits they're never gonna shake. Some are even stupid. But you? You can do what you want... be whatever you want. You're an incredible kid, Debbie. Now, you're crying, which confuses me.
 * Debbie: No one's ever said that to me before.

Chapter Twenty-Seven [2.5]

 * Meredith Peters: Make love to me, Scott.
 * Scott Guber: Well...
 * Meredith Peters: I want you to ravage me.
 * Scott Guber: It's... um... a school night.

 * Meredith Peters: ...back when I used to nurse him... he would stimulate the nipple.
 * Scott Guber: ..and that intimidates me. I admit it. What if I can't excite her as much as her son does?
 * Meredith Peters: ...and you see, that's how he makes me feel aberrant. I never nursed Jeremy for the purpose of orgasm. It was just... a windfall.

Chapter Twenty-Eight [2.6]

 * Meredith Peters: I don't get today's kids Scott... stealing a teacher's hook.

Chapter Twenty-Nine [2.7]

 * Danny Hanson: You're sick? Huh? You don't look sick to me.
 * Debbie: So? You don't look nuts, but we both know better.

Chapter Thirty [2.8]

 * Big Boy: If your son is gay...
 * Meredith Peters: He can't be! He's good at sports. He simply can't be gay.

 * Harvey Lipschultz: It's too cold. I can't teach when I see my own breath.
 * Steven Harper: Why, does it look the way it smells?

Chapter Thirty-Two [2.10]

 * Marla Hendricks: He's an institution here. The name Harvey Lipschultz is synonymous with institution.
 * Steven Harper: Because he belongs in one.

Chapter Thirty-Three [2.11]

 * Scott Guber: You lead by example Mr. Senate! You're a hothead!
 * Harry Senate: [to Harper] Ever since he put me in the Dungeon, he disses me... like my students get dissed by all the other kids!

Chapter Thirty-Six [2.14]

 * Meredith Peters: [about her son dating Harper's daughter] ...and may I also say, the idea of my son being involved in an inter-racial relationship would ordinarily cause my veins to shrivel. I don't believe in them. But because it's Brooke, and YOUR daughter, I'm open to it. I think you're both wonderful people.
 * Steven Harper: Thank you?

Chapter Thirty-Seven [2.15]

 * Union Rep: [counselling Danny Hanson not to continue his class discussions about the power of the N-word] The politics on that word could spell the end of your career, and not just at Winslow. Choose another topic. Something lighter ... like the death penalty.

 * Marla Hendricks: Well you better get into it fast, because the parents …you're gonna have them crawlin' up your ass! Not to mention teachers, students, and me! …and I'm not gonna be squiggly like a itty bitty little gerbil! I promise you that!
 * Steven Harper: I can do without the imagery, Marla.

Chapter Thirty-Eight [2.16]

 * Father: Sylvie doesn't take drugs, Ms. Hendricks.
 * Marla Hendricks: I'm not suggesting that. She may have unknowingly ingested something. Let's not forget about anthrax... and even shellfish! There's something going on with the shellfish these days. They're scavengers you know. God knows what they eat! And the drug boats... they see the coast guard coming... they dump the stuff overboard... the shellfish could be on drugs... does she like shrimp?

Chapter Forty [2.18]

 * Louisa Fenn: Harvey I'm half black, they call it a mulatto.
 * Harvey Lipschultz: Sounds like a cookie.

 * Harvey Lipschultz: [to his newly found son] I don't know whether you came looking...well....for a relationship or not you know...people that have had one with me quickly come to regret it...

 * Marla Hendricks: [to Scott Guber about Winslow's grading system] Look Scott, who's kidding who? The grading system here is all over the place. I mean, you've got a better shot at fairness going to the Olympics...as a figure skater.

 * Marla Hendricks: Harvey, Helen is dead. And as for your reputation... it's in worse shape than Helen.

Chapter Forty-Three [2.21]

 * Harvey Lipschultz: Look Marilyn, a teacher has to pick his battles. We say: "don't drink", "don't do drugs", "don't smoke" …then you want to add "don't eat your hair." They just start to tune you out.

 * Jamaal: I think my brother killed someone yesterday.
 * Harry Senate: You have to turn yourself in. Mrs. Hendrix already recognized you; others will too.

Chapter Forty-Seven [3.3]

 * Steven Harper: AND YOU! PUNCHING A WOMAN?
 * Danny Hanson: Not for nothing, but Title 9 says we can hit them now.

Chapter Forty-Nine [3.5]
Mr. Johnson: You wanna know why I got no money? [plays a piano solo] I get music, and I get how seductive it can be. It's like your guts are telling you "This is what I was meant to do." It's almost spiritual. What could be better then that?

Chapter Fifty-Seven [3.13]

 * Kimberly Woods: [on the phone with Ronnie] Sheila broke into my apartment.
 * Ronnie Cooke: You're sure someone was in your apartment?
 * [Kimberly looks at obscene graffiti on the wall.]
 * Kimberly Woods: Yes, I'm sure.

Chapter Sixty-Two [3.18]

 * Scott Guber: The little man has been spotted on school grounds. I've got out an all-points bulletin.
 * Steven Harper: How'd he get past security?
 * Scott Guber: Went right under them!

Chapter Sixty-Nine [4.3]

 * Harvey Lipschultz: I should have asked him to bless me.
 * Danny Hanson: You're Jewish, Harvey. You don't believe in Christ.
 * Harvey Lipschultz: I've been wrong before! Why not hedge my bets?

 * Marla Hendricks: Just because a white boy can sing doesn’t make him Jesus.

 * Ronnie Cooke: [referring to Mike]] I need to get his parents in here tomorrow first thing.
 * Mike: My father is God and my mother is the Virgin Mary. I don’t think they are available.

Chapter Eighty-One [4.15]

 * Henry: [after being caught hugging a female student] What's the big deal? The kid was crying. Some boy named Tristan or Clayton or whatever, he blew her off and dumped her.
 * Steven Harper: And you felt the appropriate response was to put your arms around her?
 * Henry: Yeah.
 * Ronnie Cooke: You do realize how this could look, don't you?
 * Henry: What, that I hugged a girl who was crying? Um...like I'm a nice guy?
 * Ronnie Cooke: You had your arms around a 17-year-old girl, the door was closed, and she was wearing a mini-skirt.
 * Henry: Well, I didn't pick out her clothes this morning.

Cast

 * Chi McBride - Steven Harper
 * Anthony Heald - Scott Guber
 * Loretta Devine - Marla Hendricks
 * Nicky Katt - Harry Senate
 * Sharon Leal - Marilyn Sudor
 * Fyvush Finkel - Harvey Lipschultz
 * Jeri Ryan - Ronnie Cooke [Seasons 2-4]
 * Michael Rapaport - Danny Hanson [Seasons 2-4]
 * Jessalyn Gilsig - Lauren Davis [Seasons 1-2]
 * Rashida Jones - Louisa Fenn [Seasons 1-2]
 * Joey Slotnick - Milton Buttle [Season 1]
 * Thomas McCarthy - Coach Kevin Riley [Season 1]
 * Bianca Kajlich - Lisa Grier [Season 1]
 * Leslie Jordan - Dr. Harris [Season 2]
 * Kathy Baker - Meredith Peters [Season 2]
 * Michelle Monaghan - Kimberly Woods [Season 3]
 * Jon Abrahams - Zach Fischer [Season 3]
 * Joey McIntyre - Colin Flynn [Season 3]
 * Cara DeLizia - Marcie Kendall [Season 3]
 * China Jesusita Shavers - Brooke Harper [Season 3]
 * Sarah Thompson - Dana Poole
 * John Francis Daley - Anthony Ward
 * Debbi Morgan - Superintendant Marsha Shinn
 * Lamya Jezek - Sheryl Holt

title: Boston Public


text:
User talk:69.141.140.221

~ MosheZadka (Talk) 21:08, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: User talk:69.141.140.221


text:
User talk:195.186.192.184

~ MosheZadka (Talk) 21:09, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

title: User talk:195.186.192.184


text:
User talk:ChrisH68

~ MosheZadka (Talk) 21:13, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

title: User talk:ChrisH68


text:
User talk:Laefer~enwikiquote

~ MosheZadka (Talk) 21:25, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

 * Hi. I have reverted your "period inside the quote" change to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, because that is contrary to the style we use on Wikiquote. Thanks for your attention to details! ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 21:38, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

Periods/quotes
''That's an unusual choice (but I'm willing to live with it). What's odd is that the next line down has 'cool.' with the period inside the quote. Is there a reason for the inconsistency? --Laefer 21:43, 11 October 2005 (UTC)''

 * No, the next line is a mistake. It's not as unusual as you might think -- it's called "logical quoting", and has gained a lot of ground in the last 10 years, especially outside the united states. Sorry, BTW, about reverting your Dead Cat change: that was a good change, and my mistakes. We all make mistakes sometimes, and I appreciate you being good humoured about mine. ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 21:58, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

Your account will be renamed
Hello,

The developer team at Wikimedia is making some changes to how accounts work, as part of our on-going efforts to provide new and better tools for our users like cross-wiki notifications. These changes will mean you have the same account name everywhere. This will let us give you new features that will help you edit and discuss better, and allow more flexible user permissions for tools. One of the side-effects of this is that user accounts will now have to be unique across all 900 Wikimedia wikis. See the announcement for more information.

Unfortunately, your account clashes with another account also called Laefer. To make sure that both of you can use all Wikimedia projects in future, we have reserved the name Laefer~enwikiquote that only you will have. If you like it, you don't have to do anything. If you do not like it, you can pick out a different name.

Your account will still work as before, and you will be credited for all your edits made so far, but you will have to use the new account name when you log in.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Yours, Keegan Peterzell Community Liaison, Wikimedia Foundation 23:29, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Renamed
 This account has been renamed as part of single-user login finalisation. If you own this account you can |log in using your previous username and password for more information. If you do not like this account's new name, you can choose your own using this form after logging in: . -- Keegan (WMF) (talk) 05:51, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

title: User talk:Laefer~enwikiquote


text:
Robert Hughes

Robert Studley Forrest Hughes (28 July 1938 – 6 August 2012) was an Australian art critic, writer, and documentary broadcaster.

Quotes

 * There's no geist like the Zeitgeist.
 * New York Review of Books (27 October 1983)

Donald Friend (1965)

 * No original Gauguins were to be seen in Australia, for post-impressionism was officially thought to be the vulgar effusion of five-thumbed lunatics. (p. 24)

The Shock of the New (1980)
Companion book to Hughes' TV documentary series of the same name. Thames and Hudson (1991 ed.) ISBN 0-500-27582-3

 * If the making of the series had one repeated phrase that still echoes in my head, it was not heard on the soundtrack; the inexorable voice of Lorna Pegram, the producer, muttering: "It's a clever argument, Bob dear, but what are we supposed to be looking at?" (p. 7)

 * In the real world, mice do exist and they generally go about their business whether we see them or not. (p. 17)

 * With hindsight, one can perhaps see that unachievable projects were the right monuments to an ideal. Because they were not built, they could not be destroyed. (p. 92)

 * The essential difference between a sculpture like Andre's Equivalent VIII, 1978, and any that had existed before in the past is that Andre's array of bricks depends not just partly, but entirely, on the museum for its context. A Rodin in a parking lot is still a misplaced Rodin; Andre's bricks in the same place can only be a pile of bricks. (p. 393)

The Fatal Shore (1986)

 * If Australia had not been settled as a prison and built by convict labor, it would have been colonized by other means; that was foreordained from the moment of Cook’s landing at Botany Bay in 1770. But it would have taken half a century longer, for Georgian Britain would have found it exceptionally difficult to find settlers crazy or needy enough to go there of their own free will.

Nothing If Not Critical (1991)
Selected Essays on Art and Artists. Viking/Penguin ISBN 0-394-58026-5

 * In America, nostalgia for things is apt to set in before they go.
 * "Introduction: The Decline of the City of Mahagonny"

 * The desire to be primitive was very much a function of fin-de-siècle imperialism; it appealed to strong egos and domineering minds.
 * "Introduction: The Decline of the City of Mahagonny"

 * Far from affording artists continuous inspiration, mass-media sources for art have become a dead end. They have combined with the abstractness of institutional art teaching to produce a fine-arts culture given over to information and not experience.  This faithfully echoes the drain of concreteness from modern existence— the reign of mere unassimilated data instead of events that gain meaning by being absorbed into the fabric of imaginative life.
 * "Introduction: The Decline of the City of Mahagonny"

 * What strip-mining is to nature, the art market has become to culture.
 * "Introduction: The Decline of the City of Mahagonny"

 * Perhaps the rhinos and she-crocodiles whose gyrations between Mortimer's and East Hampton give us our vision of social eminence today are content to entrust their faces to Andy Warhol's mingily cosmetic Polaroidising, but one would bet they would rather go to Sargent.
 * "John Singer Sargent" (1986)

 * It was van Gogh's madness that prevented him from working; the paintings themselves are ineffably sane, if sanity is to be defined in terms of exact judgment of ends and means and the power of visual analysis.
 * "Vincent van Gogh, Part I" (1984)

 * The sense of not having the whole story that comes from living close up to traumatic events.
 * "R.B. Kitaj" (1981)

 * It is the nature of carnivores to get power and then, having disposed of their enemies, to deploy the emollient powers of Great Art to make themselves look like herbivores.
 * "Komar and Melamid" (1982)

 * The hallmark of the minor artist is to be obsessed with style as an end in itself.
 * "Alex Katz" (1986)

 * Like most artists who have made an invention of some kind, he tends to overplay the significance of his own and goes on about it as though it were a Rosetta Stone, with whose help all representation can be rescued from one-eyed falsehood.
 * "David Hockney" (1988)

Barcelona (1992)
Published shortly before the Barcelona Olympics in 1992. Vintage ISBN 0-679-74383-9

 * New Song rapidly accumulated a nucleus of talent, and its best-known group was Els Setze Jutges, The Sixteen Judges, whose odd-sounding name came from a phrase used as a password by Catalan patriot troops during the rising against and occupation army in 1640 during the Reapers' War: "Setze jutges d'un jutjat menjen fetge d'un penjat" ("Sixteen judges on a tribunal eat the liver of a hanged man"). No lisping Castilian, it was believed, could pronounce this barrage of fricatives.
 * p. 11

 * Everything that would be said against the Eixample's heirs, from Le Corbusier's 'ville radieuse' to Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia, was already said, with far less justice, about the Eixample itself. And all its critics concurred that the basic mistake was to have left the planning of a city in the hands of a socialist.
 * p. 284

 * One thing is sure: the Sagrada Familia is the first Catholic temple whose bacon was ever saved by Shinto tourism. Not even Gaudi, who believed in miracles, could have forseen that.
 * p. 526

Culture of Complaint (1993)
The Fraying of America. Harvill Panther ISBN 186-046637-0

 * It's bad to use words like 'genius' unless you are talking about the late Jean-Michel Basquiat, the black Chatterton of the 80s who, during a picturesque career as sexual hustler, addict and juvenile art-star, made a superficial mark on the cultural surface by folding the conventions of street graffiti into those of art brut before killing himself with an overdose at the age of twenty-seven. The first stage of Basquiat's fate, in the mid-80s, was to be effusively welcomed by an art industry so trivialized by fashion and blinded by money that it couldn't tell a scribble from a Leonardo. Its second stage was to be dropped by the same audience, when the novelty of his work wore off. The third was an attempt at apotheosis four years after his death, with a large retrospective at the Whitney Museum designed to sanitise his short, frantic life and position him as a kind of all-purpose, inflatable martyr-figure, thus restoring the dollar value of his oeuvre in a time of collapsing prices for American contemporary art. One contributor to the catalogue proclaimed that "Jean remains wrapped in the silent purple toga of immortality"; another opined that "he is as close to Goya as American painting has ever produced." A third, not to be outdone, extolled Basquiat's "punishing regime of self-abuse" as part of "the disciplines imposed by the principle of inverse ascetism to which he was so resolutely committed." These disciplines of inverse ascetism, one sees, mean shooting smack until you drop dead.
 * p. 195

Things I Didn't Know (2006)

 * I realized that there is nothing whatever outside of the life we have; that the "meaning of life" is nothing other than life itself, obstinately asserting itself against emptiness and nullity.

 * We all come into the world with baggage which, in the end, we have no hope of reclaiming, The main item in mine was my father.

 * ...what has become my frequent prayer since I have had to face death -"Thy holy will, O Lord, not mine be done!"

 * How immeasurably fortunate my father was in his faith!

 * But the Japanese paper was what I loved, and now, so many years later, when I see some exquisitely laid piece of calligraphy by a student of Ogata Korin in a museum, I think first not of the spiritualized handwork of Momoyama Japan, but of those long evenings in the family garage with Dad, smoothing and stretching the refined wing coverings of those planes.

 * The best thing fishing taught me, I think was how to be alone. Without this ability no writer can really survive or work, and there is a strong relationship between the activity of the fisherman, letting his line down into unknown depths in the hope of catching an unseen prey (which may be worth keeping, or may not) and that of a writer trolling his memory and reflections for unexpected jags and jerks of association.

 * Enforced solitude, as in solitary confinement, is a terrible and disorienting punishment, but freely chosen solitude is an immense blessing. To be out of the rattle and clang of quotidian life, to be away from the garbage of other people's amusements and the overflow of their unwanted subjectivities, is the essential escape. Solitude is, beyond question, one of the worlds great gifts and an indispensable aid to creativity, no matter what level that creation may be hatched at.

 * Our culture puts enormous emphasis on "socialization", on the supposedly supreme virtues of establishing close relations with others.

 * So fishing contributed to an important lesson of my life -how to be alone. I still think solitude is one of the world's great gifts. "Se sei solo," wrote Leonardo da Vinci, "sarai tutto tuo"

 * I managed to fail Arts I, a course that a moderately intelligent amoeba could have passed without special coaching.

 * ...A column is not merely a round stick of stone: it is part of an entire symbolic system, which one cannot intuit simply by looking at it in isolation. The basic reason for studying such things is not merely technical or archivally historical but humanistic; it is to seek out the answer to what someone like Vitruvius meant by his (to us) mysterious comment that "a building should have the proportions of a man,"

 * The past is pervasive; it seeps into everything;... And yet because the past is irreplaceable and cannot be done again, it was that very past, not the present or the future, that was so delicate, so vulnerable, so dreadfully easy to erase.

 * The truly radical work of art is the one that offers you something to hold on to in the midst of the flux of possibility.

 * Some new works of art have values of some kind or another. Others, the majority, have little or none. But newness as such, in art, is never a value.

Time magazine (1996)

 * The greater the artist, the greater the doubt; perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.
 * "Modernism's Patriarch (Cezanne)", Time magazine (10 June 1996)

title: Robert Hughes


text:
The Ethical Slut

The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities, by Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt (pen name of Janet Hardy).

Sourced

 * We are particularly in favor of multiple partners having a chance to meet each other, or at least hear about each other, to dispel our self-created mythology that the other person is younger, thinner, sexier, etc. You might be surprised, when you meet your lover's lover, to find the experience downright reassuring.
 * chapter on "Jealousy"

 * We believe that it is fundamentally a radical political act to deprivatize sex. So much oppression in our culture is based on shame about sex: the oppression of women, of cultural minorities, oppression in the name of the (presumably asexual) family, oppression of sexual minorities. We are all oppressed. We have all been taught, one way or another, that our desires, our bodies, our sexualities, are shameful. What better way to defeat oppression than to get together in communities and celebrate the wonders of sex?
 * chapter on "Group Sex, Public Sex, Orgies..."

 * A ring around the finger does not cause a nerve block to the genitals.

 * A slut shares their sexuality the way philanthropists shares their money: because they have a lot of it to share, because it makes them happy to share it, because sharing makes the world a better place.

 * "Easy": Is there, we wonder, some virtue in being difficult?

 * It is amazing to us to think ... that most people in our culture have never had a chance to watch another person enjoy sex. No wonder we worry so much about our appearance.

 * Joe was very possessive. I was perfectly faithful. He would beat me, screaming imprecations, 'You slut!' when another man looked at me. After I left, I decided he was right — I am a slut, I want to be a slut, I will never promise monogamy again. After all, why would anyone care who I fucked? I will never be a piece of property again, no matter how valuable that property is considered. Joe made a feminist of me. A feminist slut.

 * Myth #3: Loving someone makes it OK to control his behavior.

 * Sex is for pleasure, a complete and worthwhile goal in and of itself. People have sex because it feels very good, and then they feel good about themselves.

 * So we are proud to reclaim the word "slut" as a term of approval, even endearment. To us, a slut is a person of any gender who has the courage to lead life according to the radical proposition that sex is nice and pleasure is good for you.

 * Some people consider any form of sex education to be child abuse, and many do not feel that children should have any information at all about adult sexual activities. ...How are we to teach our children to say 'no' to an abusive adult if we are not frank about what it is that they should say no to?

 * To believe that God doesn't like sex is like believing that God doesn't like you: we all wind up carrying a secret shame for our own perfectly natural sexual desires and fulfillments. We prefer the beliefs of a woman we met who is a devoted churchgoer. She told us that when she was about five years old, she discovered the joys of masturbation in the back seat of the family car, tucked under a warm blanket on a long trip. It felt so wonderful that she concluded that the existence of her clitoris was proof positive that God loved her.

 * We have been taught by our culture that when our partner has sex with another, we have lost something. Not to sound dumb, but we are confused. What have we lost?

 * We measure the ethics of a good slut not by the number of his partners, but by the respect and care with which he treats them.

 * We see ourselves surrounded by the 'walking wounded' — by people who have been deeply, if not irrevocably, injured by fear, shame, and hatred of their own sexual selves. We believe that happy connected sex is the cure for these wounds, that it is important, possibly even essential, to most people's sense of self-worth, to their belief that life is good. We have never met anyone who had low self-esteem at the moment of orgasm.

 * We've ... been called "indiscriminate" in our sexuality, which we resent: we can always tell our lovers apart.

 * When both genders feel free to answer 'yes' or 'no' with no concern for anything but their own desires, a truer understanding, and a more positive sexuality, can be achieved. Dossie tells the story of a woman friend of hers back in the '70s who, as an experiment, sat patiently in a singles' bar one night, being approached by many men, until finally one to whom she felt attracted came along and began to flirt. She asked him nicely if he would like to come back to her place and fuck. He swallowed his ice. It took the poor fellow a couple of minutes before he could talk coherently again, and when they actually got to her place he found himself impotent. That's how deeply ingrained some of these cultural stereotypes can be.

 * [Wilhelm] Reich theorized that without the suppression of sexuality and the imposition of anti-sexual morality, you could not have an authoritarian government, because people would be free from shame, and would trust their own sense of right and wrong. Such people are unlikely to march to war against their wishes, and we would like to think they would be unlikely to agree to operate the death camps too.

title: The Ethical Slut


text:
Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz Lozano (31 March 1914 – 19 April 1998) was a poet, writer, diplomat, and winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Mexican writer to become a Nobel Laureate.

Quotes

 * Merece lo que sueñas.
 * Deserve your dream.
 * "Hacia el Poema (Puntos de Partida)" [Toward the Poem (Starting Points)] (1950)
 * Variant translation: Deserve what you dream.

 * There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to break apart. They cannot.
 * "Signs in Rotation" (1967) in The Bow and the Lyre : The Poem, The Poetic Revelation, Poetry and History (1973) as translated by Ruth L.C. Simms, p. 249

 * Only now have I understood that there was a secret relationship between what I have called my expulsion from the present and the writing of poetry. Poetry is in love with the instant and seeks to relive it in the poem, thus separating it from sequential time and turning it into a fixed present. But at that time I wrote without wondering why I was doing it. I was searching for the gateway to the present: I wanted to belong to my time and to my century. A little later this obsession became a fixed idea: I wanted to be a modern poet. My search for modernity had begun.
 * Nobel Lecture (8 December 1990)

 * To fight evil is to fight ourselves.
 * Itinerary (1994)

 * If you are the amber mare
 * I am the road of blood
 * If you are the first snow
 * I am he who lights the hearth of dawn
 * If you are the tower of night
 * I am the spike burning in your mind
 * If you are the morning tide
 * I am the first bird's cry
 * If you are the basket of oranges
 * I am the knife of the sun
 * If you are the stone altar
 * I am the sacrilegious hand
 * If you are the sleeping land
 * I am the green cane
 * If you are the wind's leap
 * I am the buried fire
 * If you are the water's mouth
 * I am the mouth of moss
 * If you are the forest of the clouds
 * I am the axe that parts it
 * If you are the profaned city
 * I am the rain of consecration
 * If you are the yellow mountain
 * I am the red arms of lichen
 * If you are the rising sun
 * I am the road of blood
 * "Motion", as translated by Eliot Weinberger, in Collected Poems 1957-1987

 * My hands
 * open the curtains of your being
 * clothe you in a further nudity
 * uncover the bodies of your body
 * My hands
 * invent another body for your body
 * "Touch"

I stay and go: I am a pause.'''
 * Between going and staying the day wavers,
 * in love with its own transparency.
 * The circular afternoon is now a bay
 * where the world in stillness rocks.
 * All is visible and all elusive,
 * all is near and can't be touched.
 * Paper, book, pencil, glass,
 * rest in the shade of their names.
 * Time throbbing in my temples repeats
 * the same unchanging syllable of blood.
 * The light turns the indifferent wall
 * into a ghostly theater of reflections.
 * I find myself in the middle of an eye,
 * watching myself in its blank stare.
 * '''The moment scatters. Motionless,
 * Between Going and Staying

 * I am a man: little do I last
 * and the night is enormous.
 * But I look up:
 * the stars write.
 * Unknowing I understand:
 * I too am written,
 * and at this very moment
 * someone spells me out.
 * "Brotherhood: Homage to Claudius Ptolemy"

 * We are condemned
 * to kill time:
 * so we die
 * little by little.
 * "A Tale of Two Gardens"

 * The Hindu genius is a love for abstraction and, at the same time, a passion for the concrete image. At times It is rich, at others prolix. It has created the most lucid and the most instinctive art. It is abstract and realistic, sexual and intellectual, pedantic and sublime. It lives between extremes, it embraces the extremes, rooted in the earth and drawn to an invisible beyond.
 * In Light of India .Paz, Octavio In Light of India Harcourt Bruce and Company San Diego 1995 p. 185.

The Clerk's Vision (1949)

 * "Visión del escribiente" as translated by Eliot Weinberger in Eagle Or Sun? (1976)

 * And to fill all these white pages that are left for me with the same monotonous question: at what hour do the hours end?

Yes, I know, I could settle down in an idea, in a custom, in an obsession. Or stretch out on the coals of a pain or some hope and wait there, not making much noise. Of course it's not so bad: I eat, drink, sleep, make love, observe the marked holidays and go to the beach in summer. People like me and I like them. I take my condition lightly: sickness, insomnia, nightmares, social gatherings, the idea of death, the little worm that burrows into the heart or the liver (the little worm that leaves its eggs in the brain and at night pierces the deepest sleep), the future at the expense of today – the today that never comes on time, that always loses its bets. No. I renounce my ration card, my I.D., my birth certificate, voter's registration, passport, code number, countersign, credentials, safe conduct pass, insignia, tattoo, brand.
 * I too await the coming of my hour, I too exist. No. I quit.

''' And in regard to the present matter, if the present matters: I do not belong to the masters. I don't wash my hands of it, but I am not a judge, nor a witness for the prosecution, nor an executioner. I do not torture, interrogate, or suffer interrogation.''' I do not loudly plead for leniency, nor wish to save myself or anyone else. And for all that I don't do and for all that they do to us, I neither ask forgiveness nor forgive. '''Their piety is as abject as their justice. Am I innocent? I'm guilty. Am I guilty? I'm innocent. (I'm innocent when I'm guilty, guilty when I'm innocent. I'm guilty when … but that is another song. Another song? It's all the same song.) Guilty innocent, innocent guilty, the fact is I quit.'''
 * The world stretches out before me, the vast world of the big, the little, and the medium. Universe of kings and presidents and jailors, of mandarins and pariahs and liberators and liberated, of judges and witnesses and the condemned: stars of the first, second, third and nth magnitudes, planets, comets, bodies errant and eccentric or routine and domesticated by the laws of gravity, the subtle laws of falling, all keeping step, all turning slowly or rapidly around a void. Where they claim the central sun lies, the solar being, the hot beam made out of every human gaze, there is nothing but a hole and less than a hole: the eye of a dead fish, the giddy cavity of the eye that falls into itself and looks at itself without seeing. There is nothing with which to fill the hollow center of the whirlwind. The springs are smashed, the foundations collapsed, the visible or invisible bonds that joined one star to another, one body to another, one man to another, are nothing but a tangle of wires and thorns, a jungle of claws and teeth that twist us and chew us and spit us out and chew us again. No one hangs himself by the rope of a physical law. The equations fall tirelessly into themselves.

 * I remember my loves, my conversation, my friendships. I remember it all, see it all, see them all. With melancholy, but without nostalgia. And above all, without hope. I know that it is immortal, and that, if we are anything, we are the hope of something. For me, expectation has spent itself. I quit the nevertheless, the even, the in spite of everything, the moratoriums, the excuses and forgiving. I know the mechanism of the trap of morality and the drowsiness of certain words. I have lost faith in all those constructions of stone, ideas, ciphers. I quit. I no longer defend this broken tower. And, in silence, I await the event.

 * The first deaths will barely swell the daily count, and no one in the statistics bureau will notice that extra zero. But after a while everyone will begin to look at each other and ask: what's happening? Because for months doors and windows are going to rattle, furniture and trees will creak.

'''It is not the sword that shines in the confusion of what will be. It is not the saber, but fear and the whip. I speak of what is already among us.''' Everywhere there are trembling and whispers, insinuations and murmurs. Everywhere the light wind blows, the breeze that provokes the immense Whiplash each time it unwinds in the air. '''Already many carry the purple insignia in their flesh. The light wind rises from the meadows of the past, and hurries closer to our time.'''
 * No use going out or staying at home. No use erecting walls against the impalpable. A mouth will extinguish all the fires, a doubt will root up all the decisions. It will be everywhere without being anywhere. It will blur all the. mirrors. Penetrating walls and convictions, vestments and well-tempered souls, it will install itself in the marrow of everyone. Whistling between body and body, crouching between soul and soul. And all the wounds will open because, with expert and delicate, although somewhat cold, hands, it will irritate sores and pimples, will burst pustules and swellings and dig into the old, badly healed wounds. Oh fountain of blood, forever inexhaustible! Life will be a knife, a gray and agile and cutting and exact and arbitrary blade that falls and slashes and divides. To crack, to claw, to quarter, the verbs that move with giant steps against us!

The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950)
The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico, trans. Lysander Kemp (New York: Grove Press, 1961)
 * Death is a mirror which reflects the vain gesticulations of the living. The whole motley confusion of acts, occasions, regrets and hopes which is the life of each one of us finds in death, not meaning or explanation, but an end.
 * Ch. 3: "The Day of the Dead", p. 54

 * The word "death" is not pronounced in New York, in Paris, in London, because it burns the lips. The Mexican, in contrast, is familiar with death, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it; it is one of his favorite toys and his most steadfast love. True, there is perhaps as much fear in his attitude as in that of others, but at least death is not hidden away; he looks at it it face to face, with impatience, disdain or irony.
 * Ch. 3: "The Day of the Dead", pp. 57–58

 * Solitude—the feeling and knowledge that one is alone, alienated from the world and oneself—is not an exclusively Mexican characteristic. All men, at some moment in their lives, feel themselves to be alone. And they are. To live is to be separated from what we were in order to approach what we are going to be in the mysterious future. Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature—if that word can be used in reference to man, who has "invented" himself by saying "No" to nature—consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.
 * Ch. 9: "The Dialectic of Solitude", p. 195

 * Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.
 * Ch. 9: "The Dialectic of Solitude", p. 212

Sun Stone (1957)

 * Quotes from Piedra de Sol [Sun Stone] (1957)

a pillar of fountain by the wind drawn over, tree that is firmly rooted and that dances, turning course of a river that goes curving, advances and retreats, goes roundabout, arriving forever:''' water behind a stillness of closed eyelids flowing all night and pouring out prophecies, a single presence in the procession of waves wave over wave until all is overlapped, in a green sovereignty without decline a bright hallucination of many wings when they all open at the height of the sky, course of a journey among the densities of the days of the future and the fateful brilliance of misery shining like a bird that petrifies the forest with its singing and the annunciations of happiness among the branches which go disappearing, ''' hours of light even now pecked away by the birds, omens which even now fly out of my hand, an actual presence like a burst of singing''', like the song of the wind in a burning building, a long look holding the whole world suspended, the world with all its seas and all its mountains, body of light as it is filtered through agate, the thighs of light, the belly of light, the bays, the solar rock and the cloud-colored body, color of day that goes racing and leaping, '''the hour glitters and assumes its body, now the world stands, visible through your body, and is transparent through your transparency,'''
 * '''willow of crystal, a poplar of water,
 * the calm course of a star
 * or the spring, appearing without urgency,

I voyage your body as through a grove going, as by a footpath going up a mountain and suddenly coming upon a steep ravine I go the straitened way of your keen thoughts break through to daylight upon your white forehead and there my spirit flings itself down, is shattered now I collect my fragments one by one and go on, bodiless, searching, in the dark…. '''you take on the likeness of a tree, a cloud, you are all birds and now you are a star, now you resemble the sharp edge of a sword and now the executioner's bowl of blood, the encroaching ivy that over grows and then roots out the soul and divides it from itself, '''
 * I travel through your waist as through a river,

the moment scatters itself in many things, I have slept the dreams of the stone that never dreams and deep among the dreams of years like stones have heard the singing of my imprisoned blood, with a premonition of light the sea sang, and one by one the barriers give way, all of the gates have fallen to decay''', the sun has forced an entrance through my forehead, has opened my eyelids at last that were kept closed, unfastened my being of its swaddling clothes, has rooted me out of my self, and separated me from my animal sleep centuries of stone '''and the magic of reflections resurrects willow of crystal, a poplar of water, a pillar of fountain by the wind drawn over, tree that is firmly rooted and that dances, turning course of a river that goes curving, advances and retreats, goes roundabout, arriving forever:'''
 * '''I want to go on, to go beyond; I cannot;

Alternating Current (1967)

 * Man does not speak because he thinks; he thinks because he speaks. Or rather, speaking is no different than thinking: to speak is to think.
 * André Breton or the Quest of the Beginning

 * If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.
 * André Breton or the Quest of the Beginning

 * "Art" is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers…what we call art is a game.

 * To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.

 * Many psychiatrists think, like Huxley, that these substances [ hallucinogens ] are neither more nor less dangerous than alcohol. It is not necessary to entirely accept this opinion — although to me it seems to be not far from the truth — in order to recognize that the authorities prohibit these drugs not so much in the name of public health as in the name of public morality. They are a challenge to the ideals of activity, utility, progress, work, and similar notions that justify our daily routine. Alcoholism is an infraction of social rules. Everyone tolerates it because the violation confirms the rules. This case is analogous to prostitution: neither the drunk nor the prostitute and her clientele call into doubt the rules they break. Their acts are a disturbance of order, not a criticism of it. The use of hallucinogens, on the other hand, implies a negation of prevailing social values. … We can now understand the true reason for their condemnation and its severity. The authorities aren’t suppressing a reprehensible practice or a crime. They are suppressing dissidence. … Prohibition is a battle against a contagion of the spirit — against an opinion. The authorities reveal, in their ideological zeal, that they are pursuing a heresy, not a crime.
 * p. 105

The Monkey Grammarian (1974)

 * El mono gramático (1974), English translation (1981)

 * The best thing to do will be to choose the path to Galta, traverse it again (invent it as I traverse it), and without realizing it, almost imperceptibly, go to the end — without being concerned about what “going to the end” means or what I meant when I wrote that phrase. At the very beginning of the journey, already far off the main highway, as I walked along the path that leads to Galta, past the little grove of banyan trees and the pools of foul stagnant water, through the Gateway fallen into ruins and into the main courtyard bordered by dilapidated houses, I also had no idea where I was going, and was not concerned about it. I wasn’t asking myself questions: I was walking, merely walking, with no fixed itinerary in mind. I was simply setting forth to meet … what? I didn’t know at the time, and I still don’t know. Perhaps that is why I wrote “going to the end”: in order to find out, in order to discover what there is after the end. A verbal trap; after the end there is nothing, since if there were something, the end would not be the end. Nonetheless, we are always setting forth to meet … even though we know that there is nothing, or no one, awaiting us. We go along, without a fixed itinerary, yet at the same time with an end (what end?) in mind, and with the aim of reaching the end. A search for the end, a dread of the end: the obverse and the reverse of the same act. Without this end that constantly eludes us we would not journey forth, nor would there be any paths. But the end is the refutation and the condemnation of the path: at the end the path dissolves, the meeting fades away to nothingness. And the end — it too fades away to nothingness.
 * Ch. 1

 * Images, memories, fragmentary shapes and forms — all those sensations, visions, half-thoughts that appear and disappear in the wink of an eye, as one sets forth to meet…. The path also disappears as I think of it, as I say it.
 * Ch. 1

 * It is not proper to project our feelings onto things or to attribute our own sensations and passions to them. Can it also be improper to see in them a guide, a way of life? To learn the art of remaining motionless amid the agitation of the whirlwind, to learn to remain still and to be as transparent as this fixed light amid the frantic branches — this may be a program for life.
 * Ch. 2

 * Fixity is always momentary. It is an equilibrium, at once precarious and perfect, that lasts the space of an instant: a flickering of the light, the appearance of a cloud, or a slight change in temperature is enough to break the repose-pact and unleash the series of metamorphoses. Each metamorphosis, in turn, is another moment of fixity succeeded by another change and another unexpected equilibrium. No one is alone, and each change here brings about another change there. No one is alone and nothing is solid: change is comprised of fixities that are momentary accords.
 * Ch. 2

 * Ought I to say that the form of change is fixity, or more precisely, that change is an endless search for fixity? A nostalgia for inertia: indolence and its frozen paradises. Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. A constant coming and going: wisdom lies in the momentary. It is transition. But the moment I say transition, the spell is broken. Transition is not wisdom, but a simple going toward… Transition vanishes: only thus is it transition.
 * Ch. 2

 * Fixity is always momentary. But how can it always be so? If it were, it would not be momentary — or would not be fixity. What did I mean by that phrase? I probably had in mind the opposition between motion and motionlessness, an opposition that the adverb always designates as continual and universal: it embraces all of time and applies to every circumstance. My phrase tends to dissolve this opposition and hence represents a sly violation of the principle of identity. I say “sly” because I chose the word momentary as an adjectival qualifier of fixity in order to tone down the violence of the contrast between movement and motionlessness. A little rhetorical trick intended to give an air of plausibility to my violation of the rules of logic. The relations between rhetoric and ethics are disturbing: the ease with which language can be twisted is worrisome, and the fact that our minds accept these perverse games so docilely is no less cause for concern. We ought to subject language to a diet of bread and water if we wish to keep it from being corrupted and from corrupting us. (The trouble is that a-diet-of-bread-and-water is a figurative expression, as is the-corruption-of-language-and-its-contagions.) It is necessary to unweave (another metaphor) even the simplest phrases in order to determine what it is that they contain (more figurative expressions) and what they are made of and how (what is language made of? and most important of all, is it already made, or is it something that is perpetually in the making?). Unweave the verbal fabric: reality will appear. (Two metaphors.) Can reality be the reverse of the fabric, the reverse of metaphor — that which is on the other side of language? (Language has no reverse, no opposite faces, no right or wrong side.) Perhaps reality too is a metaphor (of what and/or of whom?). Perhaps things are not things but words: metaphors, words for other things. With whom and of what do word-things speak? (This page is a sack of word-things.) It may be that, like things which speak to themselves in their language of things, language does not speak of things or of the world: it may speak only of itself and to itself.
 * Ch. 4

I begin all over again: if it does not make sense to say that fixity is always momentary, the same may not be true if I say that it never is.
 * Since movement is a metaphor for change, the best thing will be to say: nonchange is (always) change. It would appear that I have finally arrived at the desired disequilibrium. Nonetheless, change is not the primordial, original word that I am searching for: it is a form of becoming. When becoming is substituted for change, the relation between the two terms is altered, so that I am obliged to replace nonchange by permanence, which is a metaphor for fixity, as becoming is for coming-to-be, which in turn is a metaphor for time in all its ceaseless transformations…. There is no beginning, no original word: each one is a metaphor for another word which is a metaphor for yet another, and so on. All of them are translations of translations. A transparency in which the obverse is the reverse: fixity is always momentary.
 * Ch. 4

 * My phrase is a moment, the moment of fixity in the monologue of Zeno the Eleatic and Huí Shih (“I leave today for Yüeh and I arrive yesterday”). In this monologue one of the terms finally devours the other: either motionlessness is merely a state of movement (as in my phrase), or else movement is only an illusion of motionlessness (as among the Hindus). Therefore we ought not to say either always or never, but almost always or almost never, merely from time to time or more than is generally supposed and less than this expression might indicate, frequently or seldom, consistently or occasionally, we don’t have at our disposal sufficient data to state with certainty whether it is periodic or irregular: fixity (always, never, almost always, almost never, etc.) is momentary (always, never, almost always, almost never, etc.) fixity (always, never, almost always, almost never, etc.) is momentary (always, never, almost always, almost never, etc.) fixity…. All this means that fixity never is entirely fixity and that it is always a moment of change. Fixity is always momentary.
 * Ch. 4

 * Repetitions, you wander about lost amid repetitions, you are merely a repetition among other repetitions. An artist of repetitions, a past master of disfigurations, a maestro of demolitions. The trees repeat other trees, the sands other sands, the jungle of letters is repetition, the stretch of dunes is repetition, the plethora is emptiness, emptiness is a plethora, I repeat repetitions, lost in the thicket of signs, wandering about in the trackless sand, stains on the wall beneath this sun of Galta, stains on this afternoon in Cambridge, a thicket and a stretch of dunes, stains on my forehead that assembles and disassembles vague landscapes. You are (I am) is a repetition among other repetitions. You are is I am; I am is you are: you are is I. Demolitions: I stretch out full length atop my triturations, I inhabit my demolitions.
 * Ch. 6

 * The Great Monkey closes his eyes, scratches himself again and muses: before the sun has become completely hidden — it is now fleeing amid the tall bamboo trees like an animal pursued by shadows — I shall succeed in reducing this grove of trees to a catalogue. A page of tangled plant calligraphy. A thicket of signs: how to read it, how to clear a path through this denseness? Hanumān smiles with pleasure at the analogy that has just occurred to him: calligraphy and vegetation, a grove of trees and writing, reading and a path. Following a path: reading a stretch of ground, deciphering a fragment of world. Reading considered as a path toward…. The path as a reading: an interpretation of the natural world? He closes his eyes once more and sees himself, in another age, writing (on a piece of paper or on a rock, with a pen or with a chisel?) the act in the Mahanātaka describing his visit to the grove of the palace of Rāvana. He compares its rhetoric to a page of indecipherable calligraphy and thinks: the difference between human writing and divine consists in the fact that the number of signs of the former is limited, whereas that of the latter is infinite; hence the universe is a meaningless text, one which even the gods find illegible. The critique of the universe (and that of the gods) is called grammar…. Disturbed by this strange thought, Hanumān leaps down from the wall, remains for a moment in a squatting position, then stands erect, scrutinizes the four points of the compass, and resolutely makes his way into the thicket.
 * Ch. 8

they are not the sensations, the perceptions, the mental images, and the thoughts which flare up and die away here, now, as I write or as I read what I write: they are not what I see or what I have seen, they are the reverse of what is seen and of the power of sight—but they are not the invisible: they are the unsaid residuum; they are not the other side of reality but, rather, the other side of language, what we have on the tip of our tongue that vanishes before it is said, the other side that cannot be named because it is the opposite of a name: what is not said is not this or that which we leave unsaid, nor is it neither-this-nor-that: it is not the tree that I say I see but the sensation that I feel on sensing that I see it at the moment when I am just about to say that I see it, an insubstantial but real conjunction of vibrations and sounds and meanings that on being combined suggest the configuration of a green-bronze-black-woody-leafy-sonorous-silent presence; no, it is not that either, if it is not a name it surely cannot be the description of a name or the description of the sensation of the name or the name of the sensation: a tree is not the name tree, nor is it the sensation of tree: it is the sensation of a perception of tree that dies away at the very moment of the perception of the sensation of tree; names, as we already know, are empty, but what we did not know, or if we did know, had forgotten, is that sensations are perceptions of sensations that die away, sensations that vanish on becoming perceptions, since if they were not perceptions, how would we know that they are sensations?; sensations that are not perceptions are not sensations, perceptions that are not names—what are they? if you didn’t know it before, you know now: everything is empty; and the moment I say everything-is-empty, I am aware that I am falling into a trap: if everything is empty, this everything-is-empty is empty too; no, it is full, full to overflowing, everything-is-empty is replete with itself, what we touch and see and taste and smell and think, the realities that we invent and the realities that touch us, look at us, hear us, and invent us, everything that we weave and unweave and everything that weaves and unweaves us, momentary appearances and disappearances, each one different and unique, is always the same full reality, always the same fabric that is woven as it is unwoven: even total emptiness and utter privation are plenitude (perhaps they are the apogee, the acme, the consummation and the calm of plenitude), everything is full to the brim, everything is real, all these invented realities and all these very real inventions are full of themselves, each and every one of them, replete with their own reality; and the moment I say this, they empty themselves: things empty themselves and names fill themselves, they are no longer empty, names are plethoras, they are donors, they are full to bursting with blood, milk, semen, sap, they are swollen with minutes, hours, centuries, pregnant with meanings and significations and signals, they are the secret signs that time makes to itself, names suck the marrow from things, things die on this page but names increase and multiply, things die in order that names may live:
 * time in an allegory of itself imparts to us lessons of wisdom which the moment they are formulated are immediately destroyed by the merest flickers of light or shadow which are nothing more than time in its incarnations and disincarnations which are the phrases that I am writing on this paper and that disappears as I read them:
 * Ch. 9

and the moment I say that, the moment I write, letter by letter, that a reality stripped of names is not reality, the names evaporate, they are air, they are a sound encased in another sound and in another and another, a murmur, a faint cascade of meanings that fade away to nothingness: the tree that I say is not the tree that I see, tree does not say tree, the tree is beyond its name, a leafy, woody reality: impenetrable, untouchable, a reality beyond signs, immersed in itself, firmly planted in its own reality: I can touch it but I cannot name it''', I can set fire to it but if I name it I dissolve it: the tree that is there among the trees is not the tree that I name but a reality that is beyond names, beyond the word reality, it is simply reality just as it is, the abolition of differences and also the abolition of similarities; the tree that I name is not the tree, and the other one, the one that I do not name and that is there, on the other side of my window, its trunk now black and its foliage still inflamed by the setting sun, is not the tree either, but, rather, the inaccessible reality in which it is planted: between the one and the other there appears the single tree of sensation which is the perception of the sensation of tree that is vanishing, but who perceives, who senses, who vanishes as sensations and perceptions vanish?
 * '''the reality beyond language is not completely reality, a reality that does not speak or say is not reality;
 * Ch. 9

our most intimate reality lies outside ourselves and is not ours, and it is not one but many, plural and transitory, we are this plurality that is continually dissolving, the self is perhaps real, but the self is not I or you or he, the self is neither mine nor yours, it is a state, a blink of the eye, it is the perception of a sensation that is vanishing, but who or what perceives, who senses?''' are the eyes that look at what I write the same eyes that I say are looking at what I write? we come and go between the word that dies away as it is uttered and the sensation that vanishes in perception—although we do not know who it is that utters the word nor who it is that perceives, although we do know that the self that perceives something that is vanishing also vanishes in this perception: it is only the perception of that self s own extinction, '''we come and go: the reality beyond names is not habitable and the reality of names is a perpetual falling to pieces, there is nothing solid in the universe, in the entire dictionary there is not a single word on which to rest our heads, everything is a continual coming and going from things to names to things, no, I say that I perpetually come and go but I haven’t moved, as the tree has not moved since I began to write, inexact expressions once again: I began, I write, who is writing what I am reading?, the question is reversible: what am I reading when I write: who is writing what I am reading?'''
 * '''no reality is mine, no reality belongs to me (to us), we all live somewhere else, beyond where we are, we are all a reality different from the word I or the word we;
 * Ch. 9

the only thing that remains of the felt, imagined, thought, perceived, and vanished realities, the only reality that these evaporated realities leave behind, a reality that, even though it is merely a combination of signs, is no less real than they are: the signs are not presences but they configure another presence, the phrases fall into line one after the other on the page and as they advance they open up a path toward a temporarily final end, '''the phrases configure a presence that disappears, they are the configuration of the abolition of presence, yes, it is as though all these presences woven by the configurations of the signs were seeking its abolition in order that there might appear those inaccessible trees, immersed in themselves, not said, that are beyond the end of this phrase, on the other side, there where eyes read what I am writing, and on reading it, dissipate it'''
 * the phrases that I write on this paper are sensations, perceptions, images, etcetera, which flare up and die down here, in front of my eyes, the verbal residuum:
 * Ch. 9

Quotes about Octavio Paz

 * In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, Octavio Paz said, "Soon I discovered the defense of poetry, disregarded in our century, became inseparable from the defense of liberty." Paz also said that "throughout history and under the most diverse circumstances, poets have participated in politics. I do not refer to poetry as a form of art to be used by the State. No. I refer to the free participation of the poets in the matters of his/her city." Paz's words ring true for the vibrant mosaic of voices this anthology exemplifies.
 * Marjorie Agosín Introduction to These Are Not Sweet Girls: Poetry by Latin American Women (2000)

 * I belong to the first generation of Latin American writers brought up reading other Latin American writers. Before my time the work of Latin American writers was not well distributed, even on our continent. In Chile it was very hard to read other writers from Latin America. My greatest influences have been all the great writers of the Latin American Boom in literature: García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, Borges, Paz, Rulfo, Amado, etc.
 * Isabel Allende Interview

 * I admire Octavio Paz very much... but I don't but I don't agree with one of his theses about Mexican history. He maintains that the Plaza of the Three Cultures is a place of sacrifices, and that because we have Aztec ancestors we are condemned cyclically to slaughter a great number of people. This thesis is highly debatable... It's not possible to say that because we carry within us the potential for human sacrifice, we retain across the years the need to kill.
 * Elena Poniatowska responding to a question about Octavio Paz's praise for La noche de Tlatelolco, attributed in The Writing of Elena Poniatowska by Beth E. Jörgensen (1994)

 * Whatever her or his social identity, the writer is, by the nature of the act of writing, someone who strives for communication and connection, someone who searches, through language, to keep alive the conversation with what Octavio Paz has called "the lost community." Even if what's written feels like a note thrust into a bottle to be thrown into the sea.
 * Adrienne Rich, Arts of the Possible (2001)

title: Octavio Paz


text:
User talk:61.8.34.53

~ MosheZadka (Talk) 04:20, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

title: User talk:61.8.34.53


text:
Talk:Despair

Moved quote here:

 * "It took hundreds of years and thousands of lives, but the Universe finally taught me it's one and only lesson. Existence is worthless." ~ Howard Weinstein

There is no such wp or wq article. If there is evidence for notabilty, either add it here, create a wp article or create a wq article, and add the quote back. Thanks ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 06:11, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

Unsourced

 * It becomes no man to nurse despair, but, in the teeth of clenched antagonisms, to follow up the worthiest till he die.
 * Alfred, Lord Tennyson

 * It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire, and many things to fear.
 * Francis Bacon

 * The fact that God has prohibited despair gives misfortune the right to hope all things, and leaves hope free to dare all things
 * Sophie Swetchine

 * The man who lives only by hope will die with despair.
 * Italian proverb

 * The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation ... A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.
 * Henry David Thoreau

 * What we call despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.
 * George Eliot

 * The specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair.
 * Søren Kierkegaard

 * Despair is Freedom.
 * Anonymous.

 * Don't you understand? Can't you see? You're all going to die!
 * Otto Witt, trying to convince the garrison at Rourke's Drift to flee (Film Zulu).

 * Senator, I agree with you-and I would also say that despair is not a method.
 * General John Abizaid, in response to Hillary Clinton's 'Hope is not a strategy'.

title: Talk:Despair


text:
Anthony Rapp

Anthony Rapp (born 26 October 1971 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American stage and film actor.

Quotes

 * I think it tells the truth and it cuts to the heart of so many profound aspects of human experience unlike many musicals, which cover more frivolous topics.
 * About the musical Rent
 * About the musical Rent

 * I do prefer men. I’ve always been very open about that. I don’t really care anymore about labels, per se, but I think it’s interesting to talk about the whole spectrum of the experiences. I think for some people, when they think that public figures say something like what I said, they’re trying to obfuscate or hide. I wasn’t trying to do that — I was trying to have an open conversation about the nature of sexuality, and that there’s a fluidity to it to some degree in some cases. I’ve always liked the word “queer,” because it’s an umbrella word that covers all of it. I also like the fact that “queer” was reclaimed from being an epithet to being a word that’s empowering.

title: Anthony Rapp


text:
Jacques Prévert

Jacques Prévert (February 4, 1900 in Neuilly-sur-Seine - April 11, 1977 in Omonville-la-Petite) was a French poet and screenwriter.

Quotes
Paroles
 * Our father who art in heaven Stay there And we will stay here on earth Which is sometimes so pretty
 * Pater Noster

 * An orange on the table Your robe on the carpet And you in my bed Sweet present of the present Coolness of the night Warmth of my life.
 * Alicante

 * It's terrible the faint sound of a hard boiled egg firmly cracked on a tin counter it's terrible this faint sound when it stirs the memory of a starving man
 * La Grasse Matinée - Sleeping In

 * I am what I am I was made this way When I want to laugh Yes I shriek with laughter I love those who love me It's my fault If they're not the same That I love everytime I am what I am I was made this way What more do you want What do you want from me
 * Je Suis Comme Je Suis - I Am What I Am

title: Jacques Prévert


text:
Louis Sachar

Louis Sachar (born March 20, 1954) is an American author of children's books.

Quotes

 * You need a reason to be angry. You don't need a reason to be happy.
 * Sideways Stories From Wayside School

title: Louis Sachar