We'll Manage

"If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action."
--Emile M. Cioran (died 1995)

Look Out Cannibals!

"When the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then thought I, 'If you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you.'...So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do."

-- Benjamin Franklin (died 1790)

The Petting Zoophobia

"In an aversion to animals the predominant feeling is fear of being recognized by them through contact. The horror that stirs deep in man is an obscure awareness that in him something lives so akin to the animal that it might be recognized. All disgust is originally disgust at touching."
-- Walter Benjamin (died 1940)

You Still Have to Take the Final

"All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing."
-- Maurice Maeterlinck (died 1949)

Perspective

"After being struck on the head by an axe, it is a positive pleasure to be beaten about the body with a wooden club."
-- Anonymous (Chinese Proverb)

The Nurse Wears Black

"Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation."
-- Tennessee Williams (died 1983)

The Gift of Life

"Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent."
-- R.D. Laing (died 1989)

ESPECIALLY IF IT'S YOUR REFLECTION

"Never attempt to murder a man who is committing suicide."
-- Woodrow T. Wilson (died 1924)

The True Value of Interior Decor

"The consumer's side of the coffin lid is never ostentatious."
-- Stanislaw J. Lec (died 1966)

Time for a Change

"This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed."
-- Charles Baudelaire (died 1866)

Got Sanity?

"I am interested in madness. I believe it is the biggest thing in the human race, and the most constant. How do you take away from a man his madness without also taking away his identity?"
-- William Saroyan (died 1981)

He's Scratching at Your Window

"We look at death through the cheap-glazed windows of the flesh, and believe him the monster which the flawed and cracked glass represents him."
-- James Russell Lowell (died 1891)

Gulp

"The fish dies because he opens his mouth."
-- Anonymous Spanish Proverb

Keep it Quiet

"Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'here are our monsters,' without immediately turning the monsters into pets."
-- Jacques Derrida (died 2004)

Optimism

"I don't believe in evil, I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots."
-- Isak Dinesen (died 1962)

You Know It In Your Gut

"Which came first: the intestine or the tapeworm?"
-- William S. Burroughs (died 1997)

Take Your Licking and Keep On Ticking

"Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have."
-- Emile M. Cioran (died 1995)

Sleep on This

"To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature."
-- Ernst Fischer (died 1972)

Peace Meal

"I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed, there would be no more wars." -- Abbie Hoffman (died 1989)

The Simple Truth

"Life is hard. After all, it kills you."
-- Katherine Hepburn (died 2003)

A Good Man is Hard to Find

"A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous."
-- Graham Greene (died 1991)

Gone Fishing

"Fish die belly upward, and rise to the surface. It's their way of falling." -- Andre Gide (died 1951)

Today's Science Lesson

"The living is a species of the dead; and not a very attractive one."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche (died 1900)

It Takes Two

"People always think that a man
commits suicide for a reason. But he
may very well commit suicide for two
reasons." -- Albert Camus (died 1960)