Epitaphs

 

Epitaphs

 

 

 Never will a young man

thrown into despair

by those honey-coloured ramparts

hanging by your ear

love you for yourself alone

and not your yellow hair.

W. B. Yeats, "For Anne Gregory"

Sharon's favorite sutta
... adults are always asking children what they want to be when they grow up: --they're looking for ideas.

--Paula Poundstone

Just as if faring through the forest, through the great wood, [one] should see an ancient path, an ancient road -- even so have I seen an ancient path, an ancient road traversed by the fully enlightened ones of former times. And what ...is that ancient path? Right understanding, right attitude, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration. This is that ancient path, that ancient road, traversed by the fully enlightened ones of former times.

--Siddharta Gautama the Buddha, Sanyutta-nikaya: XII, 7, 65

We were being introduced to one of the most precious of American freedoms, which is our freedom to broaden our personal culture by absorbing the cultures of others.

--Ralph Ellison

The difference between one who is awakened and one who is not is simply a question of whether or not the person grasps at a limited story.

--Jack Kornfield A Path with Heart

Separatiion and connection make each other

possible. They are not mutually exclusive. One recoils from the

revelation of one's lover's freedom, as does Joe. We are like

Freud and his friends shrinking from the terrifying transitoriness

of the flower's bloom. Joe insists on holding on. Or Joe simply

withdraws, abiding in the familiar delusion of premature closure,

instead of trusting love's ability constantly to reassert itself.

J. Gordon Liddy, "Is Joe Dense? A Case Study Analysis of Personal Identity," Personasophical Studies 4 (1998)

All the bare-legged girls, and the poised and natural girls with strong muscles, and strong free steps wherever they go--the girls that redeem America and make it worth while to have founded a new world, no matter how badly it was done... And the boys too that have a chance to be unafraid of beauty, to be to be unafraid of the natural life and free aspiration of an intelligent animal walking on the earth--all who have in any measure escaped from the rigidity and ritual of our national religion of negation, all of them owe an immeasurable debt to Isadora Duncan's dancing.

--Max Eastman, "Isadora Duncan is Dead," The Nation, September 28, 1927

Here we are now. --Entertain us!

--Nirvana,"Smells like teen spirit"
Jamie saw her life like a great tree.

--Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

 

...liberating, and consoling. When I believed that my existence was such a further fact [like a soul or something existing separately from one's experiences], I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others. (Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, p. 281)

 

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