Sounds about right.

 "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only." - Dickens 1859

book quotes

"...when Ulysses on the Larboard shunned Charybdis."

Paradise Lost, Milton 

“Leisure follows the consumption pattern,” Alice said, “and is managed by an industry that sells boredom-compensating commodities.”

The Quick and The the Dead by Joy Williams

"Let peace brood over this carass"

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson 

"She had a mature distrust of the trivial, the facile and the vulgar."

Tender is the Night, F Scott Fitzgerald 

"A teahouse amid the cherry blossoms, on the way to death"

The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt

"We are dining in a room with a bed in it. I am disgusted with life."

"I am so; I do my work! the rest is not my affair."

"Like two goats of darkness upon the bridge of the infinite."

Les Miserables, Victor Hugo

"... they already represented all human society; on one side envy, on the other disdaine."

"The good must be innocent"

Les Miserables, Victor Hugo

"Olympian Zeus: your urgings rule the world."

The Iliad, Homer

"...the perfectly indifferent chill night air..."

"... sharing a joke with nothingness."

"He was not reading, or sleeping, but basking like a creature gorged with existence."

To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf 

War and Peace quotes

"Pierre discerned in his friend that need that he himself knew only too well to become aroused and argue about some extraneous matter in order to stifle personal thoughts that were too painful."

"that summer languor, that content and discontent with the present to which one is particularly susceptible on a bright, hot day in town."

"A cricket was chirping in a crack as if to celebrate his victory over all the world."

"The absence of suffering, the satisfaction of one’s needs, and the consequent freedom of choice of one’s occupation, that is, one’s way of life, now seemed to Pierre to be unquestionably man’s highest happiness."

"With his sixty years’ experience he knew how much weight to attach to rumors, knew how apt men are, when they want something, to manipulate all the evidence so that it appears to confirm what they desire, and knew how readily they overlook whatever speaks against it."

War And Peace

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance", Essays: First Series, 1841

 A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance", Essays: First Series, 1841

Shakespeare quotes

"Call home thy ancient thoughts from banishment,

And banish hence these abject lowly dreams"

--Taming of the Shrew Induction II.13

"The last leave of thee takes my weeping eye." -- Richard II II.ii

"Doomsday is near; die all, die merrily."--Henry IV part 1  IV.i

"Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust." -- Cymbeline 

the worship of revenge

"Til I have set a glory to this hand

By giving it the worship of revenge"

King John IV.iii

quote

"Even the gods cannot strive against necessity." -- Diogenes Laertius

"dice, Venus, and the tavern!"

'"Poor purse ... How cruelly thou hast been gutted by dice, Venus, and the tavern!"'

-- The Hunchback of Notre Dame book VI chapter IV

THIS IS GROUND CONTROL TO STEVEN SPIELBERG...

In CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, in the scene where they're setting up the giant Lite-Brite keyboard to contact the aliens, and everyone very busy getting all the gear ready, if the keyboard guy would have plunked out a couple of lines from David Bowie's SPACE ODDITY, the part that goes, "This is ground control to Major Tom..." and all the workers kind of looked up from their work for a second, realized what they had heard, and had a little chuckle, that would have been so awesome, you guys

THE MEANING OF LIFE (close enough anyway)

There is none, but there is a close, close approximation.

On this, the end of the world (?) {December 21, 2012} I am writing that yesterday, the day before the end of the world, I watched Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life" (1983).

I have watched this movie many time throughout my 46 years, because I am that way.  I think it is hilarious, and I have always thought, that at the end of the movie, they summed it up in an offhand way with this quote, which I had memorized for along time, being a Monty Python fan.  It goes like this:

M-hmm. Well, it's nothing very special. Uh, try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations. 

And for years, I thought this was a great summary of some good advice, but it isn't, of course the MEANING OF LIFE, as the movie title suggests, but just some sound advice, and it's funny because it is basically saying, "there isn't any meaning of life, just be nice."

But last night, watching the movie again, I finally found, after close to thirty years of loving this movie, the true nugget of the film.  It happens in a board meeting of otherwise douchebag executives.  One of them starts off asking about "item six" on the agenda.

Exec #1: Item six on the agenda: "The Meaning of Life" Now uh, Harry, you've had some thoughts on this.

Exec #2: Yeah, I've had a team working on this over the past few weeks, and what we've come up with can be reduced to two fundamental concepts. One: People aren't wearing enough hats. Two: . . . this "soul" does not exist ab initio as orthodox Christianity teaches; it has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved owing to man's unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia. 

Exec #3: What was that about hats again?

This is the entire crux of the movie, and I have been missing it for thirty years.

Now this isn't the "meaning of life" as there is no intrinsic "meaning of life" but it is so close, it bears discussion . . .  { there's more, but this is a book excerpt from the book I'm working on.}

here's the clip:

Words I've noted to look up while reading Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. I'm on page 79:

polyphony, diabolus in musica, tesseract, krupskaya, philology, egalitarian -pg 46:,the Trial of the Templars, Ophiulco, navigli, Etruscan(48), demiurge(49), Finis Austriae(51), cabalistic(ally)(53), paralogism (56), ontological (56), and "Godel's Theorem.

Quote: "There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics."(54)

Wisdom from the Antiques Road Show

So I'm watching Antiques Road show, (I'm old), and one of the appraisers, David Lackey, was talking about some pottery, and he said the following:

"Now these have an old label on the bottom. Sometimes old labels are right, sometimes they're wrong, but you still look at them and consider what they say."

That applies to people too.

the first draft...

"The first draft of anything is shit" -- Ernest Hemingway

quote

Enjoy your work: it leads to groceries and rent money. -- dan manning

Fun Fact!

The first sentence of the Declaration of Independence is 71 words long:

"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

quote

I reject your reality, and substitute my own! -- mythbusters