Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.
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What is it about genus arboretum that socks us in the figurative solar plexus We see a logging truck go cruising down the road, stacked with a bunch of those fresh-cut giants, we feel like we lost a brother. Next thing you know, we're in The Brick, we're flopping money down on the bar. Wood. We're under a roof. Wood. We're walking the floors. Wood. Grabbing a pool cue. That's wood. Our friends in the forest carry a set of luggage from the mythical baggage carousel. Tree of life, tree of knowledge, family tree, Buddha's Bodhi tree. Page one of life, in the beginning. Genesis 322. Adam and Eve. They're kicking back in the garden of Eden and boom, they get an eviction notice. Why is that Lest they should also take of the tree of life, eat and live forever. A definitive Yahweh no-no. Be good to yourself, go out and plant a wet one on a tree.
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One, I have a wonderful publisher, Black Sparrow Press; as long as they exist, they will keep me in print. And they claim they sell very respectable numbers of my books, so I guess, and it's true, every place I go, my books are in libraries and on bookshelves.
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Dad and I had breakfast this morning. We had a look at each other's speeches. He would have used mine, but he's not a lesbian. I would have us...
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It gets to seem as if way back in the Garden of Eden after the Fall, Adam and Eve had begged the Lord to forgive them and He, in his boundless exasperation, had said, All right, then. Stay. Stay in the Garden. Get civilized. Procreate. Muck it up. And they did.
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We're both on the rebound, or whatever that terminology is when you're in recovery from a divorce. We have that in common, both scratching our heads fighting being cynical. And it's hard. You need a lot of humor to fight cynicism, and this movie has it - both, actually. So it's great.
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There's a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle.
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There is nothing sadder in this world than the waste of human potential. The purpose of evolution is to raise us out of the mud, not have us grovelling in it.
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Learning to live what you're born with is the process, the involvement, the making of a life.
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American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.
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Real meaningful endeavours, the biggies in human existence, often require the sacrifice of others.
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By mid-November I always like to have an extra 15 pounds on me.
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We were estimating about $700,000, so we're quite a bit over what we thought we were going to get. We all know what happened to the tourism industry after Sept. 11. Since then, we've been building up again. Now we're almost at pre-Sept. 11 levels.
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A man should not leave this earth with unfinished business. He should live each day as if it was a pre-flight check. He should ask each morning, am I prepared to lift-off?
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As a scientist, I am not sure anymore that life can be reduced to a class struggle, to dialectical materialism, or any set of formulas. Life is spontaneous and it is unpredictable, it is magical. I think that we have struggled so hard with the tangible that we have forgotten the intangible.
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Death is the enemy. I spent 10 years of my life singlemindedly studying, practicing, fighting hand to hand in close quarters to defeat the enemy, to send him back bloodied and humble and I am not going to roll over and surrender.
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A person has three choices in life. You can swim against the tide and get exhausted, or you can tread water and let the tide sweep you away, or you can swim with the tide, and let it take you where it wants you to go.
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A lone carnival voice Sings tunes of nobody's choice, And on a vacant lot, Some one just forgot, Standing all alone, Turning on its own. Weary merry go round, Grows slowly into the ground, And faded circus acts, Sorrow broke their backs, And their sadness cries From their staring eyes. Still small children come And bring your harm of play, Spirits all alive To drive the ghosts away. Useless merry go round, Tomorrow they'll tear you down, To build the parking lot If it lives or not, It was just a toy, All it brought was joy.
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I always admired atheists. I think it takes a lot of faith.
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A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.
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Trees like to have kids climb on them, but trees are much bigger than we are, and much more forgiving.
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I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do -- that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.
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If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life. I mean people are going to say, You're crazy. Plus they're going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that's a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.
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There can be no spirituality, no sanctity, no truth without the female sex.
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Though most of us don't hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, you have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes. Animals that hear high frequencies better than we do
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After all, coffee is bitter, a flavor from the forbidden and dangerous realm.
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There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.
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Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one agrees on just what it is.
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My favorite thing is to go where I've never been.
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People are simply incapable of prolonged, sustained goodness.
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