Continued from v. 2012
Patience, Please
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Quotations, v. 2015
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My community band director: “Now do it again without me grunting for you.” “Just listen to the voices!” “[J], you’re a strong man, but…. maybe consider using smaller cymbals?”
“I’m just here to play a little poker, have a few drinks, and find out the meaning of life.”
~Sydney Freedman – M*A*S*H
As I was leaving the Irishman’s roof after the rain, bending my steps again to the pond, my haste to catch pickerel, wading in retired meadows, in sloughs and bog-holes, in forlorn and savage places, appeared for an instant trivial to me who had been sent to school and college; but as I ran down the hill toward the reddening west, with the rainbow over my shoulder, and some faint tinkling sounds borne to my ear through the cleansed air, from I know not what quarter, my Good Genius seemed to say—Go fish and hunt far and wide day by day—farther and wider—and rest thee by many brooks and hearth-sides without misgiving. Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth. Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures. Let the noon find thee by other lakes, and the night overtake thee everywhere at home. There are no larger fields than these, no worthier games than may here be played. Grow wild according to thy nature, like these sedges and brakes, which will never become English bay. Let the thunder rumble; what if it threaten ruin to farmers’ crops? That is not its errand to thee. Take shelter under the cloud, while they flee to carts and sheds. Let not to get a living be thy trade, but thy sport. Enjoy the land, but own it not. Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like serfs.
O Baker Farm!
“Landscape where the richest element
Is a little sunshine innocent.”…
“No one runs to revel
On thy rail-fenced lea.”…
“Debate with no man hast thou,
With questions art never perplexed,
As tame at the first sight as now,
In thy plain russet gabardine dressed.”…
“Come ye who love,
And ye who hate,
Children of the Holy Dove,
And Guy Faux of the state,
And hang conspiracies
From the tough rafters of the trees!”
Men come tamely home at night only from the next field or street, where their household echoes haunt, and their life pines because it breathes its own breath over again; their shadows, morning and evening, reach farther than their daily steps. We should come home from far, from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day, with new experience and character.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, chapter 10
“every day i open my eyes i find poetry in even the simplest things”
— Dave Strider
“Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi! et ecce intus eras et ego foris, et ibi te quaerebam.”
(“Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved Thee! and lo, You were within me, and I was outside myself, and there I sought Thee.”)
– St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, c. 397 A.D.
“And how we deal with this… we don’t.”
I think my differential equations professor has become my spirit animal. At least when trying to get useful results out of innocuous-looking PDEs.