My favorite words: Fear = Victim

Man victimizes what he fears.

Barbara Tuchman
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My Favorite Words: The Problems of Causality

War is too unpleasant and costly a business to be sustained successfully without a cause.

Barbara Tuchman
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My Favorite Words: The Lessons of History

If autocrats always acted wisely they would not furnish history with moral lessons.

Barbara Tuchman
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My favorite words: The Muse

A muse is someone who makes you better than you are. I think I am better because she believes that I am better than I am, and that blind faith gives me a lot of strength.

Pedro Almodóvar
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That Thing of the Poets: Autumn Leaves - haiku

"Autumn Leaves"

Oh! blurs twilight soft
And ah! now levitates leaves
The Central Park mist

Hugo Pezzini
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My favorite words: Three lines by Barbara W. Tuchman

Satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.

____________

In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.

____________

Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.

Barbara B. Tuchman
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My favorite words: A Sailor's Love

When I'm not with the girl I love, I love the girl I'm with.

Slightly altered from Yip Harburg's "Finian's Rainbow"
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My favorite Words: On Reputation

What has been longest known has been most considered, and what is most considered is best understood.

Dr. Johnson.
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That Thing of the Poets: On War

To say it clearly, I mean that the Iliad is a story of war, without care and without measure. It was composed in praise of a warring humanity, and it did it in such a memorable way that it should last throughout eternity and reach the last descendant of our last descendants, still singing the solemn beauty and the irredeemable emotion that war once and always will be. ... (A)t its heart lies this: The Iliad is a monument to war.

Alessandro Baricco
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Now down we came to the ship.

Homer
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That Thing of the Poets: What the Irish Did with the Greek...

Joyce did other than acknowledge Homer's position: he re-imagined the story of the primordial journey undertaken by every man in every age. His coupling was less between Ulysses and Bloom than between Homer and Joyce himself, less between the creations than between the creators.

Alberto Manguel
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That Thing of the Poets: Thinking of the Blind One...

Up there,
High on the walls, the dirge has already begun.
They're mourning the memory, the aura of our days.

Constantine Cavafy.
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Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
You'll have understood by then what these Ithakans mean.

Constantine Cavafy.
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My favorite words: Truth.

All I have written is true, except the lies.

Timothy Findley
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My Favorite Words: Truth.

Myth does not mean something untrue, but a concentration of truth.

Doris Lessing
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My Favorite Words: That Sailor!

My purpose holds,
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the Western stars, until I die.

Lord Tennyson
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Latin American Story:

...a certain South American diplomat told (the Mexican critic) Alfonso Reyes that whenever he returned to his country, he imagined the dictator in office thinking, "I must distrust this man, he knows his grammar."

Alberto Manguel
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My Favorite Words: For or Against?

Freud followed Nietzsche in noting that the value we place in life after death was a development of post-Homeric times.

Alberto Manguel


* *

Freud treated Nietzsche's writings as texts to be resisted far more than to be studied.

Peter Gay
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My Favorite Words: War & Death

Si vis pacem, para bellum
(If you want peace, prepare for war)

Andromache & Hector

* *

Si vis vitam, para morten
(If you want life, prepare for death)

Sigmund Freud
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The Classics

Nietzsche... understood that one of the qualities of a classic is that it elicits from the reader a double sense of witnessed truth: that of poetic artifice and that of experienced reality, or, in Nietzschean terms, that of Apollonian illusion and that of Dionysian struggle.

Alberto Manguel (commenting on Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy)
*Note on Nietzsche:
Nietzsche studied in both Bonn and Leipzig and was elected to the Chair of Classical Philosophy at the University of Basel at age twenty-five. He wrote The Birth of Tragedy at age twenty-eight.

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That Thing of the Poets: On Beauty

(A sort of prologue)

What songs the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles
Assumed when he hid among the women, though
Puzzling questions are not beyond conjecture.

Sir Thomas Browne

* *

There was a world, or was it all a dream?

Hellen of Troy (according to Homer)

* *

Zeus planted a killing doom whithin us both,
So even for generations still unborn
We will live in song.

Hellen (to Paris, according to Homer)

* *

Ah, no wonder the men of Troy and Argives under arms have suffered
Years of agony all for her, for such a woman.
Beauty, terrible beauty!

Homer

* *

Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Illium?
Sweet Hellen, make me immortal with a Kiss.

Christopher Marlowe

* *

Hellen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicaean barks of yore
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
The weary, wayworn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.

Edgar Allan Poe

* *

Hot through Troy's ruin Menelaus broke
To Priam's palace, sword in hand, to sate
On that adulterous whore a ten years' hate
And a King's honour though red death, and smoke,
And cries, and then by quieter ways he strode,
Till the still innermost chamber fronted him.
He swung his sword, and crashed into the dim
Luxurious bower, flaming like a God.

High sat white Hellen, lonely and serene.
He had not remembered that she was so fair,
And that her neck curved down in such a way;
And he felt tired. He flung the sword away,
And kissed her feet, and knelt before her there,
The perfect Knight for the perfect Queen.

Rupert Brooke

* *

Is it a memory? Has a delusion seized my mind?
Was I all that? And am I?
And shall I still be?
The nightmare image, Helena the cities bane?

Hellen of Troy (according to Goethe)
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On Writing: Federico Jeanmaire

No esperar más a que llegaran, cuando se les ocurriera, ni las ideas ni las palabras con las que escribir esas ideas. Aprender a buscarlas. A pesar de ellas. Y también a pelearlas y a discutirlas y a escucharlas. Sobre todas las cosas, me parece, aprender a escucharlas con los oídos bien abiertos. Ser escritor.

Federico Jeanmaire
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My Favorite Words: Who's on First?

Goethe once remarked that he could think of only thirty-six tragic situations.

Friedrich Nietzsche
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Gozzi maintained that there can be
but thirty-six tragic situations. Schiller took
great pains to find more, but he was unable
to find even so many as Gozzi.

Goethe
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My Favorite Words 19: Pray Thee!

When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle.
Then I realized God doesn’t work that way, so I stole
one and prayed for forgiveness.

Emo Philips
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My Favorite Words: Pretending

Education: That which discloses to the wise & disguises from the fool
their lack of understanding.

Ambrose Bierce
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My Favorite Words: Stuporous

My heart is moved by all I cannot save: So much has been destroyed.
I have to cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.

Adrienne Rich
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My Favorite Words: Defined

Jealousy is a passion which with eagerness seeks what causes pain.

Sigmund Freud
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My Favorite Words: The Remains of the Day

If while alive you hurt or disappoint people you love, there is no use continuing such behavior when you're dead.

Anthony Swofford.
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My favorite words: "The" actor

Marlon Brando's going to class to learn the Method (Acting) was like sending a tiger to jungle school.

Elaine Stitch
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That Thing of the Poets 9: A Lot!

Too much is not enough.

Gavin Rossdale (Bush --the band, not The Assassin)
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The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

William Blake
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My Favorite Words: Traduttore -- Traditore!

What is translation?
On a platter a poet's pale and glaring head, a parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter, and a profanation of the dead.

Vladimir Nabokov
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My Favorite Words: The Latin Poet

Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo

Vergilius Maro
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My Favorite Words: Blakean

The Grandest poetry is Immoral, the Grandest characters Wicked.

William Blake
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My Favorite Words: Cartesian

Doubt is our passion.

Henry James
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On Writing

All the attention and engagement and work you need to get from the reader can't be for your benefit; it's got to be for hers.

David Foster Wallace
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Perceived Reality: Perceiving Reality?

Only for the most select and most balanced minds does it seem possible to guard the perceived picture of external reality against the distortion to which it is otherwise subjected in its transit through the psychic individuality of the one perceiving it.

Sigmund Freud
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Mi favorite words 23: On Writers

Literatos populares são literatos impopulares entre os literatos.

Millôr Fernandes.
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My Favorite Words 22: On Language

The commerce of language is the intermediary of Love.

Aneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II)
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