Share passages, poems, etc., by fav writers

“Poor soul, you will never know anything
of real importance. You will not uncover
even one of life's secrets. Although all religions
promise paradise, take care to create your own
paradise here and now on earth.”
― Omar Khayyám, The Ruba'iyat of Omar Khayyam

“The tongue can conceal the truth, but the eyes never! You're asked an unexpected question, you don't even flinch, it takes just a second to get yourself under control, you know just what you have to say to hide the truth, and you speak very convincingly, and nothing in your face twitches to give you away. But the truth, alas, has been disturbed by the question, and it rises up from the depths of your soul to flicker in your eyes and all is lost.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out consume Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as sloshed as Schlegel.
There’s nothing Nietzsche couldn’t teach ya ’bout the raisin’ of the wrist. Socrates himself was permanently pissed.
John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
after half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.
Plato, they say, could stick it away,
‘alf a crate of whiskey every day!
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle,
and Hobbes was fond of his Dram.
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart: “I drink, therefore I am.
” Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he’s pissed.

(Monty Python)

Jack Kerouac

I caught a cold from the sun
when they tore my heart out at the
top of the pyramid
Oh the ruttle tootie blootie window poopie
of fellow Ack Ack
town that russet moon
where priests dared lick their lips
over my thumping meat heart

I can't find my copy of Kerouac's On the Road right now so I hope my memory of that chapter is accurate. I have to confess the first time I read anything of Kerouac was when I was about 12 at a slumber party with 8 other 12 year old girls. The host shared the book she said her beatnik uncle left at their house, I'm not going to pretend I was moved because I WAS ONLY 12 at the time. So 9 of us were taking turns reading outloud and laughing because we had been up for hours and hours and we were GIRLS getting giddy. But our host, Young Miss Kathleen gave me the book and I still have it.

One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person,
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.

Of physiology from top to toe I sing,
Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say
the Form complete is worthier far,
The Female equally with the Male I sing.

Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,
Cheerful, for freest action form’d under the laws divine,
The Modern Man I sing.

Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass

“Lying in bed, I could hear the trams far away in the distance. Turning the corners heavily, and gathering speed for the hills. I used to hear them back in Dublin on the Northside when I was small, lying in bed, avoiding the eye of the Sacred Heart in the picture on the far wall. The house we lived in was a great lord's town house before it was a tenement, and there was a big black Kilkenny marble fireplace before my bed. If the souls in Purgatory really came back, it was out of there they would come.”
― Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy

“He felt a spasm of excitement because he knew instinctively who it was, or at least knew who it was he wanted it to be, and once you know what it is you want to be true, instinct is a very useful device for enabling you to know that it is.”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“When Great Trees Fall

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.”
― Maya Angelou

Great writing here, I love poems but couldn't write my words as a poem. May be its always because of I'm not writer.

“And I knew in my bones that Emily Dickinson wouldn't have written even one poem if she'd had two howling babies, a husband bent on jamming another one into her, a house to run, a garden to tend, three cows to milk, twenty chickens to feed, and four hired hands to cook for. I knew then why they didn't marry. Emily and Jane and Louisa. I knew and it scared me. I also knew what being lonely was and I didn't want to be lonely my whole life. I didn't want to give up on my words. I didn't want to choose one over the other. Mark Twain didn't have to. Charles Dickens didn't.”
― Jennifer Donnelly, A Northern Light

"Things fall apart. The center cannot hold."

W.B. Yeats from the second coming.

Pretty much sums up my feelings of the world today. Sorry for being so grim.

I consider it being realistic in this crazy time.

Amazing what brilliance emerged from those two lines: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and The Center Cannot Hold by Joan Didion.

Hah! I didn't know that.

I’d’ve never read the Achebe novel had it not been required reading in my first college English course. Very satisfying.

For a while his poem Vultures was part of the AQA poetry anthology for GCSE students, (16 year olds.)

No comfort has the fire at night
That lights the face so cold . . .

The Battle of Evermore

Robert Plant & Jimmy Page

There's a Ghost Gum out in the paddock
He stands there all alone
Been there more'n a hundred years;
Aint got the heart to bring him down
So tall and so majestic
A grander sight I doubt you'd see.

WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU RABBITIN ON ABOUT?
MATE, IT'S ONLY A BLOODY TREE.

It's only a bloody tree you say
And there's some who think you're right
And I'm not the sort of man what prays,
But I reckon in God's sight:
That thing you call a bloody tree
Could be more important than you and me.

author?
I know that's on at least one other forum, but I didn't see who wrote it.

It would have been under one of the other names I use, on the many christian forums from which I have been banned, mainly because of my opposition to the belief of the so called virgin birth.