"War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus."
~Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900-1944)

Men grow tired of sleep, love, singing and dancing sooner than war.~Homer, The Iliad

"You are doing your best only when you are trying your hardest to improve what you are doing."
~Ace Parker (1912- )

All the best on your 100th, Ace - stick around for another hundred years just to keep 'em on their toes!

The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.
~ Peter Shaffer



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If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers.
-- Irvin S. Cobb: (1876-1944) US journalist, author.

Somehow I just knew I wouldn't be able to get through the week without having to do another obit - and it isn't like I didn't have a lot of material to work with during the last three days.

"I'm so thankful I let God into my life, I would've been long dead by now if I hadn't."
~LaDonna Adrian Gaines (Donna Summer 1948-2012)

Donna Summer in 2009 at The Nobel Peace Price Concert

Photo courtesy Harry Wad (<< definitely an unusual name...)


...

I'm gone for the long weekend, catch up with you on Monday evening.

All the great villainies of history, from the murder of Abel to the Treaty of Versailles, have been perpetrated by sober men, and chiefly by teetotalers. But all the charming and beautiful things, from the Song of Songs to Terrapin à la Maryland, and from the nine Beethoven symphonies to the Martini cocktail, have been given to humanity by men who, when the hour came, turned from well water to something with color to it, and more in it than mere oxygen and hydrogen.~H.L. (Henry Louis) Mencken (1880—1956), Prejudices: Fourth Series [1924]

Some people say, “Never let them see you cry.” I say, if you’re so mad you could just cry, then cry. It terrifies everyone.
~Tina Fey



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To know oneself is wisdom, but to know one's neighbor is genius.
-- Norman Douglas: (1868-1952) Scottish novelist.

The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
~ George Santayana

No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.
-- H. L. Mencken: (1880-1956) US editor, satirist

The chance to do evil is found a hundred times a day, and that of doing good once a year.~Voltaire, Zodig (1748)

I must learn to love the fool in me, the one who feels too much, talks too much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries.~Theodore Isaac Rubin

The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first.
~Jim Morrison



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Plain women know more about men than beautiful ones do.~Katherine Hepburn

I'll never understand why men are so focused on physical attractiveness, but as long as they are, I'll have no choice but to live a celibate life.~"Sarah Sims" (A character in Angela Hunt's The Face [2008], Chapters 12 & 14)

It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.~Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) Physiologie du Mariage [1829)

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
~Winston S. Churchill



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Liberty has restraints but not frontiers.
-- David Lloyd George: (1863-1945) English statesman.

On Victoria Day:

"We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist."
~Queen Victoria (1819-1901)

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.~Anais Nin

"We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action."
~Frank Tibolt (1897-1989)