The words dripped on my consciousness, sank into my being, and carried me away to the magic long ago of once upon a time.
There are times I almost think I am not sure of what I absolutely know. Very often find confusion in conclusion I concluded long ago. In my head are many facts that, as a student, I have studied to procure. In my head are many facts of which I wish I was more certain I was sure.
O how long ago the earth would have been destroyed, if Mary had not interposed!
Long ago we conquered our passions looking at ourselves in the mirror of eternity.
I found out long ago that the place where the law is apt to be abused the most is right around a courthouse.
I mean, in the foreword to Impro in Denmark is by Søren Iversen, who I taught long ago, he was a Danish director, after he left. He said he'd read about [Eugeny] Vakhtangov. I'm a fan of his. When he heard that Vakhtangov had lots of tricks, he thought this was very bad. But when he came to be my student, he realised it was very good to have a lot of tricks. You saw some this morning.
Wages never seem to go up. The whole economy feels stuck, and millions of Americans, millions of Americans, middle-class security is now just a memory. Progressives like to talk like Barack Obama likes to talk forever about poverty in America. And if a talk did any good, we'd have overcome those deep problems long ago. This explains why under the most liberal president we have had so far, poverty in America is worse, especially for our fellow citizens who were promised better and who need it most.
Once a man came to me - it was not too long ago - and said that he had given away much landed property and many goods for his own sake so that he might save his soul. Then I thought: 'How little and how insignificant is what you have let go of! It is blindness and foolishness for you to continue looking at all you've let go of. If, however, you've let go of yourself, then you've really let go.'
I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice.
I find it very odd that the amendment about the right to bear arms, laws that were written so long ago, still pertain and don't get adjusted properly. Because the right to bear arms doesn't mean automatic weaponry designed specifically for human combat.
I wrote an article not so long ago that was published in the Los Angeles Times, and I think I titled it "Movies vs. History." But I think they had another title for it. I got sort of sick and tired of seeing movies that got picked apart by people because they had taken dramatic or poetic license and I said "These people don't understand the distinctions."
Long, long ago, before eruptions were invented, the molten lava had to be carried down the mountainside, bucket by bucket, and poured over the sleeping villagers. This took time.
I take really good care of myself. I promised myself long ago that I would never miss a hunting season, never poison my sacred temple with drugs, alcohol, tobacco or bad food.
Chemistry, until my childhood, not that long ago, was regarded as a calculating device. Because you couldn't reduce to physics. So it's just some way of calculating the result of experiments. The Bohr atom was treated that way.
What magicians we are, turning darkness into light, transforming invisible atoms into dazzling theater of the world, pulling objects, (people as well as rabbits) out of secret microscopic closets, turning winter into summer, making a palmful of moments disappear through time's trap door. We learned the methods so long ago that they're unconscious, and we've hypnotized ourselves into believing that we're the audience, so I wonder where we served our apprenticeship. Under what master magicians did we learn to form reality so smoothly that we forgot to tell ourselves the secret?
I always like to make explicit the fact that before I went off not too long ago to fight in the trenches, I was a mathematician by profession. I don't like people to get the idea that I have to do this for a living. I mean, it isn't as though I had to do this, you know, I could be making, oh, three thousand dollars a year just teaching.
I don't think too much about the past when I am actually playing, I prefer to concentrate on the present. The performance of a piece, no matter how long ago or where it was written, is always a new production, something that comes alive in the present. And it doesn't matter if the piece was written two or three hundred years ago if it is alive in us.
I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.
Where the vast cloudless sky was broken by one crow I sat upon a hill - all alone - long ago; But I never felt so lonely and so out of God's way, As here, where I brush elbows with a thousand every day.
This is the real and the only reason for friendship: to provide a mirror so the other person can contemplate his image from the past, which, without the eternal blah-blah of memories between pals, would long ago have disappeared.
Time is like a wheel. Turning and turning - never stopping. And the woods are the center; the hub of the wheel. It began the first week of summer, a strange and breathless time when accident, or fate, bring lives together. When people are led to do things, they've never done before. On this summersday, not so very long ago, the wheel set lives in motion in mysterious ways.
It is not unknown for fathers with a brace of daughters to reel off their names in order of birth when summoning the youngest, and I had long ago become accustomed to being called 'Ophelia Daphne Flavia, damn it.
A reader kindly pointed out to me recently that most of the quotes I include are by men. And it's true. Personally, I don't even consider whether the author is male or female, nor even care much who the author is - what's significant is the message. Of course, women are equally capable of great insights, however in our culture it's not so long ago that women could not even be published
I love bookshelves, and stacks of books, spines, typography, and the feel of pages between my fingertips. I love bookmarks, and old bindings, and stars in margins next to beautiful passages. I love exuberant underlinings that recall to me a swoon of language-love from a long-ago reading, something I hoped to remember. I love book plates, and inscriptions in gifts from loved ones, I love author signatures, and I love books sitting around reminding me of them, being present in my life, being. I love books.
Clichés remind and reassure us that we're not alone, that others have trod this ground long ago.
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