Smooth

Shwanky. from Grr on 8tracks Radio.

Dang, this mix is slick. This is my second time listening to it and it is still groovy.

Speaking of slick and groovy, I just finished the first 2 seasons of The Mentalist and Simon Baker knows how to work a crowd. And Patrick Jane is definitely the modern Sherlock. Got lots of new mind games up my sleeve. I'll use them carefully...

Holding on to Black Metal by My Morning Jacket,  Everything Moves by Bronze Radio Return, When They Fight, They Fight by the Generationals and Everyone Knows by Vacation are the highlights of the mix.

Well, school starts again soon. You know what this means. Less posts. But, I will be seizing Cloud Atlas ASAP from the library so quotes will be up for that too.

By the way, I read quite recently We The Living by Ayn Rand, so I've completed all her fiction works. Did not really enjoy it... Atlas Shrugged was better written. By far.

Rage, rage

Do not go gentle into that good night
by Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right, 
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright 
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight 
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Read this poem and was struck with an instant connection. Love it. I choose to read it with the interpretation that one mustn't give in gently to death, but instead rage against the 'dying of the light,' and fight for life.

The Broship of the Ring

This is not something I'd normally post, but after hours spent meditating to the LOTR soundtrack, re-watching (and sobbing at) clips, and today reading the appendixes of the novel, I've decided to go check out some LOTR tumblrs and this meme is hilarious. Love the Mean Girls reference. Love how Legolas says it. Cannot wait for The Hobbit (and yes I've watched all the production videos for that, too). Might write a little Samwise Gamgee Appreciation Post soon. Wanted to wait until April 6th (his birthday) to do that but I'm really itching to! Until then, all.

I value vision, and dread being struck stone blind

Hello all - I return with... quotes from Villette!
I loved this book. More evidence to add to the pile of reasons why Charlotte is definitely my favourite Bronte. Jane Eyre, from my perspective, was undoubtedly better constructed (in terms of plot) and exposed in comparison to Wuthering Heights, but Villette is another story entirely. It is not always a 'happy' book - then again, neither is Wuthering Heights - and perhaps Lucy Snowe is not as strong of a feminist as Jane Eyre was - but Charlotte Bronte has turned Lucy Snowe's sorrows and jealousy into melancholic self-reflection, a search for independence, the truth about her own faith, and happiness. Instead of a rage of tantrums and vengeance (cough Wuthering Heights cough).

So, I've aimed to be more concise with the quote selection this time. Here they are -

This first one introduces what Lucy was already struggling - her fantasies and solid ground on reality. She was one to be always wearing a grey, plain dress - and one that would prefer and insist it so be so.

I seemed to hold two lives—the life of thought, and that of reality; and, provided the former was nourished with a sufficiency of the strange necromantic joys of fancy, the privileges of the latter might remainlimited to daily bread, hourly work, and a roof of shelter.

And whenever she would enter the 'life of thought,' as shown in the quote below - her daydream -

In my reverie, methought I saw the continent of Europe, like a wide dream-land, far away. Sunshine lay on it, making the long coast one line of gold; tiniest tracery of clustered town and snow-gleaming tower, of woods deep massed, of heights serrated, of smooth pasturage and veiny stream, embossedthe metal-bright prospect. For background, spread a sky, solemn and dark blue, and grand with imperial promise, soft with tints of enchantment—strode from north to south a God-bent bow, an arch of hope.

to the surprise of the reader, she would throw a knife in the middle of a growing, lovely passage and delete her musings -

Cancel the whole of that, if you please, reader—or rather let itstand, and draw thence a moral—an alliterative, text-hand copy—

and instead revert back to reality and holding firm that -

Day-dreams are delusions of the demon.

This quote below truly relates! An innocent, honest way of admitting that everyone has preferences, unfair they may be.

Our natures own predilections and antipathies alike strange. There are people from whom we secretly shrink, whom we would personally avoid, though reason confessesthat they are good people: there are others with faults of temper, etc., evident enough, beside whom we live content, as if the air about them did us good.

More to add to the statement above is the quote below:

It is not every friend whose eye is a light in a sickroom, whose presence is there a solace.

This is what I meant with her struggle with faith, yet perseverance -

I believe in some blending of hope and sunshine sweetening the worst lots. I believe that this life is not all; neither the beginning nor the end. I believe while I tremble; I trust while I weep.

Bronte does this a lot - she personifies certain nouns, like Liberty, Hope, and Memory, and there are several (verbose) passages in which these personified nouns truly become human-like, evidence of her daydreaming, and are described in a spell-bounding fashion, but I'll leave that for you readers to discover on your own. Below, however, is a brief example.

Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars--a cage, so peril, loneliness, an uncertain future, are not oppressive evils, so long as the frame is healthy and the faculties are employed; so long, especially, as Liberty lends us her wings, and Hope guides us by her star.

Short quote - considered excluding it - but it does say something on self pity, and recognition of remorse and sadness.  And forcing herself to do so, in my opinion, is considered maybe even immature, or self pity to the extent where she wishes to wallow in it. Both quotes below relate to this behavior.

To livehere, in this close room, the watcher of suffering . . . I forced myself to realise evils, I think I was too prosaic to idealise, and consequently to exaggerate them.

There is a perverse mood of the mind which is rather soothed than irritated by misconstruction; and in quarters where we can never be rightly known, we take pleasure, I think, in being consummately ignored.

Just a cool quote:

His veins were dark with a livid belladonna tincture, theessence of jealousy. I do not mean merely the tender jealousy of theheart, but that sterner, narrower sentiment whose seat is in the head.

This is something I used to think about, and still agree with - false flowers are as bland as mannequins and the ones plucked were given only a moment to live, away from their home, and not by choice. It is sad.

I like to see flowers growing, but when they are gathered, they cease to please. I look on them as things rootless and perishable; their likeness to life makes me sad. I never offer flowersto those I love; I never wish to receive them from hands dear to me.

Love this -

Time, like distance, leds to certainscenes an influence so softening; and where all is stone around, blank wall and hot pavement, how precious seems one shrub, how lovely an enclosed and planted spot of ground!

And my absolute favourite, so descriptive, memorable and fitting, here it is:

No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure. Happiness is a glory shining far down upon us out of Heaven. She is a divine dew which the soul, on certain of its summer mornings, feels dropping upon it from the amaranth bloom and golden fruitage of Paradise.

A dream inside a dream might not be a dream.

Last.... batch of quotes from the Border Trilogy. I really must be more concise with these next time... but these were truly lovely. Could not leave them.

The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of their claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transciencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one.

His hands clasped behind him at the small of his back in a stance he had perhaps admired or read of but a stance native to some other country, not his.

“When you’re a kid you have these notions about how things are goin to be, Billy said. You get a little older and you pull back some on that. I think you just wind up tryin to minimize the pain. Anyway this country aint the same. Nor anything in it. The war changed everthing. I dont think people even know it yet.”

"Your friend is in the grip of an irrational passion. Nothing you say to him will matter. He has in his head a certain story. Of how things will be. In this story he will be happy. What is wrong with this story? 

What is wrong with this story is that it is not a true story. Men have in their minds a picture of how the world will be. How they will be in that world. The world may be many different ways for them but there is one world that will never be and that is the world they dream of. Do you believe that? “Maybe. Anyway, some men get what they want. No man. Or perhaps only briefly so as to lose it. Or perhaps only to prove to the dreamer that the world of his longing made real is no longer that world at all. ”

periodic click like a misset metronome, a clock, a protent. a meaure of something periodic and otherwise silent and vastly patient which only darkness could accommadate.

“The dead boy in his arms hung with his head back and those partly opened eyes beheld nothing at all out of that passing landscape of street or wall or paling sky or the figures of the children who stood blessing themselves in the gray light. This man and his burden passed on forever out of that nameless crossroads and the women stepped once more into the street and the children followed and all continued on to their appointed places which as some believe were chosen long ago even to the beginning of the world.”

He said that perhaps death took a larger view. That perhaps in his egalitarian way death weighed the gifts of men by their own lights and that in death's eyes the offerings of the poor were the equal of any. Like God.

Where do we go when we die? he said. I dont know, the man said. Where are we now?

In the middle of my life, he said, I drew the path of it upon a map and I studied it a long time. I tried to see the pattern that it made upon the earth because I thought that if I could see that pattern and identify the form of it then I would know better how to continue. I would know what my path must be. I would see into the future of my life. How did that work out? Different from what I expected. It was interesting. It looked like different things.

"When you look at the world is there a point in time when the seen becomes the remembered?"

“I know it. There's hard lessons in this world. What's the hardest? I dont know. Maybe it's just that when things are gone they're gone. They aint comin back. Yessir.”

“If we do not know ourselves in the waking world, what chance in dreams?”

He said that the light of the world was in men’s eyes only for the world itself moved in eternal darkness and darkness was its true nature and true condition and that in this darkness it turned with perfect cohesion in all its parts but that there was naught there to see. He said that the world was sentient to its core and secret and black beyond men’s imagining and that its nature did not reside in what could be seen or not seen. He said that he could stare down the sun and what use was that?

Taiwan

 These two were taken on the train

The street below my grandmother's apartment - when darker, the white specks are stars

The sea from a plane - the white specks are boats. They too, are like stars

Taiwan from the sky

A beautiful sunset in Ping Tung 

The first catholic church ever built in Asia - right in Ping Tung. I'm not Christian but this was a lovely, lovely place. 

Busy Taipei!! 台北不是我的家，我的家鄉沒有霓虹燈...

Sifted clouds! Cut and jagged.

The sea... on the way to a large temple

The sky at 6 outside my aunt's home

I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.

I am BACK from Taiwan and this blog has suffered a one-month lapse of writing. But no fear... I will be uploading some photos soon and for the meantime, enjoy some quotes from To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I was meaning to upload these (it is one of my most loved books) but never had the time to. We studied it for class. A book not only expressing the injustice of racism, but also a successful bildungsroman that captures the growth of a young girl and her family through a small town poisoned with prejudice. Lovely book.

They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions... but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. 

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.

Love the two above.

It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.

“Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy . . . but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing. 

It's never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn't hurt you.

Folks don’t like to have somebody around knowin’ more than they do. It aggravates ‘em. You’re not gonna change any of them by talkin’ right, they’ve got to want to learn themselves, and when they don’t want to learn there’s nothing you can do but keep your mouth shut or talk their language.

But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal- there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court. It can be the Supreme Court of the United States or the humblest J.P. court in the land, or this honourable court which you serve. Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levellers, and in our courts all men are created equal.

"An' they chased him 'n' never could catch him 'cause they didn't know what he looked like, an' Atticus, when they finally saw him, why he hadn't done any of those things... Atticus, he was real nice..." "Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them."

Atticus had two yellow pencils for me and a football magazine for Jem, which I suppose was a silent reward for our first day's session with Mrs. Dubose.
"Jem, she's old and ill. You can't hold her responsible for what she says and does. Of course, I'd rather she'd have said it to me than to either of you, but we can't always have our 'druthers."