miscquotes: October 2007 Archives
“It is Mardis Gras. Creole food everywhere. Crowds in costume jam the streets. A man dressed as a shrimp is thrown into a steaming pot of bisque. He protests, but no one believes he is not a crustacean. Finally he produces a driver’s license and is released.”
—Woody Allen, Reminiscences: Places and People, from Side Effects, 1980.
"I would suggest that academies be established where young people will learn to get really high . . . high as the Zen master is high when his arrow hits a target in the dark . . . high as the Karate master is high when he smatshes a brick with his fist . . . high . . . weightless . . . in space. This is the space age. Time to look beyond this run down radioactive cop rotten planet. Time to look beyond this animal body."
"William Burroughs, Academy 23: A Deconditioning, The Village Voice, 1967.
"We, all of us, have a need to identify our bodily rhythms with those of the cosmos.
The wind in a forest of fir. The spilling of grain in the fields. The migration of bird and seed. The trek of atom and star.
That is why we dance."
"Tom Robbins, To Dance, Helix magazine, 1967.
"Every joke is a tiny revolution."
"George Orwell, quoted by Emma Larkin in Finding George Orwell In Burma, 2005.
Last week I mentioned that the Shwedagon Pagoda in Rangoon, Burma, reminded me of the North Carolina State Fair. I think I should explain that comment further. The Shwedagon Pagoda consists of a massive, stunning gold pagoda, and a complex of hundreds of smaller pagodas and temples. When I visited it, the area was thronging with people and monks who were gradually circling the main pagoda on a beautiful day. Everyone seemed to be having a wonderful time. There was plenty to look at; there were painted concrete animals and characters, temple after temple, with spinning fortune-telling devices and other clever ways to give offerings at many of them. OK, the Shwedagon Pagoda was not nearly as crowded as the North Carolina State Fair, and it was much cleaner and more aesthetically more appealing than the North Carolina State Fair, but there was a similar sense of camraderie and excitement and plain old fun in the air.
Have I mentioned the great courtesy and sly humor of the people I spoke English with in Burma" At one point a man, perhaps noticing my eyes, showed me the way to a beatiful deep green wooden temple. It was built, he said, expressly for green-eyed people. There was no Buddha in it, because green-eyed people tend to be foreign and non-Buddhist. The temple was very tall, because green-eyed people tend to be tall. And, he added, tapping his head and smiling, "they tend to have good brains."
"My anxiety grew as I watched people stepping on and off what looked to me like moving stairs, and realized we would have to do the same. As far as I knew there was only one escalator in the whole of Burma, in Rangoon. It was quite a tourist attraction, and I had once gone to look at it, but discovered that it had not been in working order for years."
"Pascal Knoo Thwe, From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey, 2002.
"He was giving orders for a toothpick-case for himself, and till its size, shape, and ornaments were determined, all of which, after examining and debating for a quarter of an hour over every toothpick-case in the shop, were finally arranged by his own inventive fancy, he had no leisure to bestow any other attention on the two ladies, than what was comprised in three or four very broad stares; a kind of notice which served to imprint on Elinor the remembrance of a person and face, of strong, natural, sterling insignificance, though adorned in the first style of fashion."
"Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 1811.
"As I write you the stomping, rollicking, scintillating, solid, hot, strains of Guy Iturbi Ignacz Lombardo are filling the air. To say his occarino and glackenspiel sections have improved is an understatement."
"Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City, 1950.