Quotation Station
While waiting on a file transfer, perhaps I can share a variety of quotes that have caught my mind lately.
I attended San Francisco’s Unitarian Universalist church for the first time this Sunday. One of the hymns has some lyrics which I dug:
We’ll be a land building up ancient cities,
Raising up devastations from old;
Restoring ruins of generations.
Oh, we’ll build a land of people so bold.Barabara Zanotti
“We’ll Build a Land”
Then, several quotes from the August, 2006 issue of The Sun, dealing mostly with romantic relationships. (A subject especially near and dear to my heart this year.)
It remains inexplicable to me that we can finally become happy again after someone we love has died. Yet there I stood at the end of my bed, a scant four years out, feeling happy. Was this not betrayal? It does not help to say that the dead are gone and do not care. The problem of grief is never with them; it is with us, with those who remain. Like the bed we lie in, it is ours.
Susan Carol Hauser
“The Marriage Bed”
And a bunch of “Sunbeams” starting with something light-yet-presidential:
President and Mrs. Coolidge, visiting a government farm, were taken on separate tours. At the chicken pens Mrs. Coolidge paused to inquire of the overseer whether the rooster copulated more than once a day. “Dozens of times,” said the man. “Tell that to the president,” requested Mrs. Coolidge. The president came past the pens and was told about the rooster. “Same hen every time?” he asked. “Oh, no, a different one each time.” Coolidge nodded. “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge,” he said.
Bartlett’s Book of Anecdotes
Then, keeping it short and sweet, an Italian proverb:
Bed is the poor man’s opera.
I myself, prefer the art of the bedroom.
Then, a pair of lengthier quotations that resonate very clearly with my own feelings and experiences:
A young couple is led to imagine that marriage is a box full of goodies, . . . that they can sit down and eat out of this box all their lives, and it will never be empty. But it is empty. There will never be anything in it unless the partners put it there. And if they do not want it to be empty, they must put in a lot more than they are in the habit of taking out. But the young romantic who imagined it ought to be endlessly full of goodies institutes a lawsuit against God and the marriage partner as soon as he discovers the score of the game. He feels swindled. But he imagines the next box he buys will be full even though the first one was empty.
Willard and Marguerite Beecher
I knew couples who had been married almost forever — tending each other’s illnesses, dealing with money troubles or the daughter’s suicide or the grandson’s drug addiction. And I was beginning to suspect that it made no difference whether they’d married the right person. You’re just with who you’re with. You’ve signed on with her, put in half a century with her, grown to know her as well as you know yourself, and she’s become the right person. I wish someone had told me that earlier; I’d have hung on then.
Anne Tyler
And last, on the virtue of simplicity in doing my day-job:
I’m a big fan of making UNIX tools simple. I’ve found that the greater the complexity of your system, the greater the chances of it breaking, and the harder it will be to diagnose problems when it breaks. You may also never notice it’s broken as it may break in subtle ways that will only bite you later.
Joe Gross
Easy MySQL Backups
