In almost every book there's a line or two that will make you say, "Oh, that's perfect!" Maybe it's a line that strikes just the right chord or one that makes you think or look at something in a new way. Sometimes... it's just a smile. 

So what do I do?  I steal 'em!  Well, I borrow them anyway and share them with friends. Who knows... it might just get you to go out and find the book.  Steve K  6/8/2003

... I always intended, you know, to journey again to the far eastward. But no, you could not have known. I have not spoken of that even in my family circle. It has been a dream I treasured too much to share.

Yes, I meant to go again sometime. But when I was freed from Genoa and returned to Venice, the family business demanded my attention, and so I hesitated to depart. And then I met... So I hesitated again a while, and then there was a daughter... So for one reason and another, I kept on hesitating, and suddenly one day I was old.

Old! It is inconceivable! When I look into our book... I see myself there a boy, and then a youth, and then in my manhood, and even at the book's very end I am still a stalwart. But when I look into a glass, I see there an aged stranger, sapped and sagged and blemished and enfeebled by the corroding rusts of five and sixty years. I murmur, "That old man cannot go again a-journeying," and then I realize: that old man is Marco Polo.

Gary Jennings - The Journeyer

Thinking and planning is one side of life; doing is another. A man cannot be doing all the time. 

That night I lay awake again, but no god spoke to me, not even to tell me that she was not for me. The gods do not visit you to remind you of what you know already. 

Mary Stewart - The Crystal Cave

"People who dream when they sleep at night know the special kind of happiness. The placid ecstasy and ease of heart that are like honey on the tongue. The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream but in this... that these things happened without any interference from his side and altogether outside his control. Great landscapes creating themselves..." 

 Isak Dinesen (Countess Karen Blixen) - Out of Africa

There are worse things to do in in life than to have a quest to fulfill. If you turned back now, what would you do? I don't know that, either. You've come a long way. You must have overcome great difficulties. My people say Gaea likes a good story, and she likes great heroes. Are you a hero?

 John Varley - Titan

Change -- even good change -- was hard. Very hard indeed.

Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman - Into the Labyrinth

'You don't have to give a damn about me,' he said defiantly. 'That's not important. What you feel doesn't validate or invalidate anything I feel. I had to understand that. Once I did, then, instead of exalting what I felt, I had to find what was good in it, what was strong, and I had to learn how to make of use of it. I'm still doin' that, still learning. The more I learn, the more hope I have that I can actually do some good. I know that must sound corny to you, man. And maybe it is corny. But not very many people get the kind of opportunity I've been handed.' ...

Love, I thought, sweet Christ, love, is it? I believed in the existence of love, you understand, but not in its potentials. Throughout my life - intermittently, I admit - I had tried to act out of love, to perform some miracle of being, to exert enough control over my common urges so as to bring forth a clean ray of feeling that would transform the base metal of possibility into something of gold. All that had resulted from these efforts were failures and betrayals, and a thick sour mental residue of spoilage and shame. Yet I still believed love was in me. Black pools of it, reservoirs secreted beneath the granitic plates of my being. Untappable. A wasted and daunting resource. ...

'Listen,' he said, and made an amused noise. 'You can almost hear it... the one true commandment of the East. Thou must exult in the ineluctable, thou must dance to comprehend and understand nothing of stillness, thou must know only love, and love only knowledge.'

The music soared, sounding at one moment whining and horrid, and at the next lovely and serpentine... it had no true beginning, it had simply started up, and its end would not be a finale, but a mere stoppage of breath. ...

'My God!' he said with awe, with despair, with yearning, as if he heard within that chaos the ringing of a sweet and secret bell... 'My God, will you just listen to that!'

 Lucius Shepard - Kalimantan

The reference to Wallace Reid in "To My Dog" begins,

I often wonder why on earth
You rate yourself so highly;
A shameless parasite from birth
You've lived the life of Reilly
No claims to fame distinguish you:
Your talents are not many;
You're constantly unfaithful to
Your better self--if any.

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards.

Samuel Clemens

"Forward: Thinking" - personal thoughts on "FWD: FWD: FWD'ed" e-mail

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