No Country for Old Men

"It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people can't be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it."

-Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

The Little Prince, pg 91

"Here, then, is a great mystery. For you who love the little prince, as for me, nothing in the universe can be the same if somewhere--we do no know where--a sheep we have never met has or has not eaten a rose.
Look up at the sky. Ask yourselves: has the sheep eaten the flower or not? And you will see how everything changes...
And no grown-up will ever understand the significance of this!"

--Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince, pg 91

The Little Prince, pg 13

""Straight ahead does not take anyone very far...'"

--Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little , pg 13

Moby Dick, pg 56

"It is not down in any map; true places never are."

Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 12, pg 56

Moby Dick, p44

"But perhaps, to be true philosophers, we mortals should not be conscious of so living or so striving. So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have 'broken his digester.'"

Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 10, pg 44.

Moby Dick, pg 30

"And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for."

Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 5, pg 30.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines

"Love is so short, forgetting is so long."

Pablo Neruda, Tonight I can write the saddest lines

The Railroad

If our future journeys are to be little different from flashes of light, with no interim landscape and no interim thought, I think we will have lost the whole good of journeying and will have succumbed to a mere preoccupation with getting there.

E.B White, The Railroad

The Quiet American, pg 18

'"How did you know he was dead?"
It was a foolish police man's question, unworthy of the man who read Pascal, unworthy also of the man who so strangely loved his wife. You cannot love without intuition.'

Graham Greene, The Quiet American, pg 18

Ayckbourn on comedy

I’ve found that the darker the
drama the more you need to
search for the comedy. If you
don’t let the audience off the
hook occasionally to laugh when
you want them to, you’ll find
them roaring with laughter during
moments you didn’t intend.
One of the endearing features of
the human race is that we can’t
generally keep serious for long.
Be thankful for it. If we could
we’d probably have become
extinct long ago.

AYCKBOURN ON COMEDY

The Lover, pg 19

You didn't have to attract desire. Either it was in the woman who aroused it or it didn't exist. Either it was there at first glance or else it had never been. It was instant knowledge of sexual relationship or it was nothing. That too I knew before I experienced it.

Marguerite Duras, The Lover, p19

The Comedians, pg 21

" 'Vegetarianism isn't only a question of diet, Mr Brown. It touches life at many points. It we really eliminated acidity from the human body we would eliminate passion.'

'Then the world would stop.'

He reproved me gently, "I didnt' say love,' and I felt a curious sense of shame. Cynicism is cheap--you can buy it at any Monoprx store--it's built into all poor-quality goods."

Graham Greene,The Comedians, pg 21

The Tempest, IV. I.150-157

"And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."

--Shakespeare, The tempest, IV.I. 150-157