Quotishness

About the Quotes of the Day: It's a huge file because I've been obsessively collecting quotes for years—500 pages at last count with an average of 10 quotes per page. My three criteria for collecting quotes are that they are: 1) interesting; 2) attributable (no anonymous quotes, please); 3) that they come to me randomly (i.e., I don't look them up in quote books/sites); and oh, there is a fourth thing, 4) that they come back out of the file randomly. I don't always agree with the quotes that go into and back out of The File because I don't edit out opposing views, only hate speech and the like. That is why when I post the quotes at work I also post a disclaimer.


Disclaimer for the Quote of the Day:

These quotes do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, MYJOB or its subsidiaries, Leonard Maltin, Siegfried and Roy, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. However, sometimes they do reflect the views of the Cottingsley Fairies.


Quotes of the day:

"In waking from a dream, we obliterate worlds, and in calling up a memory, we return the dead to life again and again only to bring them face-to-face with annihilation as our attention shifts to something else."

—Jeffrey Ford, Memoranda


"It has been asserted, that a moral Atheist would be a monster beyond the power of nature to create: I reply, that it is not more strange for an Atheist to live virtuously, than for a Christian to abandon himself to crime! If we believe the last kind of monster, why dispute the existence of the first?"

—Pierre Bayle, 1647-1706


And then there's this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mgm48JYJJ04

A predator in repose

The cantalilies were particularly lovely this morning—near six feet tall, some of them, and loads of bright orange blooms. They, at least, like the current humidity. The bougainvillea is looking fuller now, too. It was lush and gorgeous in spring; every evening when the sun sank low the trellis blazed with a glory of crimson-reflected light. It had died back a bit, but the humidity seems to have brought it back.

Today's view out the front window was further enhanced by a flock of red-winged blackbirds, clambering over the crimsoned trellis to get to the bird feeders there. We only see them for a few weeks while they're migrating south-north or vice versa. The Ballona wetlands are less than a half-mile down the hill from us so we do tend to get some interesting birds migrating in and out.

In the spring we had a kestrel nesting in one of the big trees on the other side of the back fence. We heard the piping call of the bird and its young for weeks. I love kestrels—such tiny predators. I love all hawks. I know they prey on the little birds that use our feeders, but they're just doing what comes naturally, so I can't blame them. And they are so beautiful, all hawks: their sleekness, their dignity, the utter stillness of their eyes. Is there anything calmer than the eyes of a predator in repose?