“The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it’s so accidental. It’s so much like life.”
-Arthur Miller, 1915-2005.

“Men always want to be a woman’s first love – women like to be a man’s last romance.”
– Oscar Wilde

“Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.”
– J.M. Barrie

“I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.”
– G. K. Chesterton

“Ambition is to the mind what the cap is to the falcon; it blinds us first, then compels us to tower by reason of our blindness.”
– Charles Caleb Colton

Balancing that previous wide-eyedly optimistic post:

“Anyone committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable… Because this is war, baby. And war is hell.”
– Successful novelist and screenwriter Steven Pressfield

“Vision is not enough; it must be combined with venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps; we must step up the stairs.”
– Vaclav Havel

“The only thing more unpalatable than a logophile is perhaps one who types.”
– The inimitable Vic Sarjoo, in response to my earlier repartee.

On Being Twenty-Six
by Philip Larkin

I feared these present years,
The middle twenties,
When deftness disappears,
And each event is
Freighted with a source-encrusting doubt,
And turned to drought.

I thought: this pristine drive
Is sure to flag
At twenty-four or -five;
And now the slag
Of burnt-out childhood proves that I was right.
What caught alight

Quickly consumed in me,
As I foresaw.
Talent, felicity ó
These things withdraw,
And are succeeded by a dingier crop
That come to stop;

Or else, certainly gone,
Perhaps the rest,
Tarnishing, linger on
As second-best.
Fabric of fallen minarets is trash.
And in the ash

Of what has pleased and passed
Is now no more
Than struts of greed, a last
Charred smile, a clawed
Crustacean hatred, blackened pride ñ of such
I once made much.

And so, if I were sure
I have no chance
To catch again that pure
Unnoticed stance,
I would calcine the outworn properties,
Live on what is.

But it dies hard, that world;
Or, being dead,
Putrescently is pearled,
For I, misled,
Make on my mind the deepest wound of all:
Think to recall

At any moment, states
Long since dispersed;
That if chance dissipates
The best, the worst
May scatter equally upon a touch.
I kiss, I clutch,

Like a daft mother, putrid
Infancy,
That can and will forbid
All grist to me
Except devaluing dichotomies:
Nothing, and paradise.

ìWhen trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy.î
ñ Dave Barry