“It's hard to salvage jettisoned cargo and, if it is retrieved, it's usually irreparably damaged. And I fear that when you can afford to fish up the honor and virtue and kindness you've thrown overboard, you'll find they have suffered a sea change and not, I fear, into something rich and strange.”

― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”

― C.G. Jung

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.

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Women. They are a complete mystery.

Stephen Hawking

Are you the Judean Peoples Front
F off
What ?
Judeans Peoples Front....Were the Peoples Front of Judea ! Judeans peoples front
Wankers
Can I join your group
p**s off

I adore that poem.  In fact, many years ago, I set it to music (octet and narrator) and submitted it for my A-level music exam.

The WW I poets attract a lot of (well justified) admiration.  I particularly like the less well known WW II poet Keith Douglas.  He died during the D-Day invasion.  He was buried by a hedge near where he fell.  I read this and feel an ineffable sadness.


How to Kill

Under the parabola of a ball,
a child turning into a man,
I looked into the air too long.
The ball fell in my hand, it sang
in the closed fist: Open Open
Behold a gift designed to kill.

Now in my dial of glass appears
the soldier who is going to die.
He smiles, and moves about in ways
his mother knows, habits of his.
The wires touch his face: I cry
Now. Death, like a familiar, hears

and look, has made a man of dust
of a man of flesh. This sorcery
I do. Being damned, I am amused
to see the centre of love diffused
and the waves of love travel into vacancy.
How easy it is to make a ghost.

The weightless mosquito touches
Her tiny shadow on the stone,
and with how like, how infinite
a lightness, man and shadow meet.
They fuse. A shadow is a man
when the mosquito death approaches.

“I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all.”

― Sigmund Freud