"We cannot live without connection, both psychic and physical. We begin to die of pointlessness when we're isolated, even if some of us can hang on for a long while connected to nothing beyond our imaginations."

--William Kittredge, Doing the Good Work Together

"Neither innocence nor vigilance may be protection against the howling heart of evil."

--Fox Mulder, The X-Files

Moonlit Night
by Tu Fu

The moon tonight in Fu-chou
She watches alone from her chamber,
While faraway I think lovingly on daughters and sons,
Who do not yet know how to remember Ch'ang-an.
In scented fog, her cloudlike hairdo moist,
In its clear beams, her jade-white arms were cold.
When shall we lean in the empty window,
Moonlit together, its light drying traces of tears.

Rendezvous of Light
by Emily Dickinson

Pass to thy Rendezvous of Light,
Pangless except for us --
Who slowly ford the Mystery
Which thou hast leapt across!

"Hey look! Another lens-flare-in-the-eye! I wish I had a lens flare in MY eye...yes sir, I think I could strut down the city streets and talk jive if I had a lens flare in my eye."

--Scott Balay

"Evil: That which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake."

--H. L. Mencken

"Now comes the mystery."

--Henry Ward Beecher

Spending the Night in a Tower by the River
by Tu Fu

A visible darkness grows up mountain paths,
I lodge by the river gate high in a study,
Frail cloud on a cliff edge passing the night,
The lonely moon topples amid the waves.
Steady, one after another, a line of cranes in flight;
Howling over the kill, wild dogs and wolves.
No sleep for me. I worry over battles.
I have no strength to right the universe.

"With your busy schedule, the last thing you need to worry about is facial tissue."

--Puffs advertisement

Pity Me Not Because the Light of Day
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Pity me not because the light of day
At close of day no longer walks the sky;
Pity me not for beauties passed away
From field and thicket as the year goes by;
Pity me not the waning of the moon,
Nor that the ebbing tide goes out to sea,
Nor that a man's desire is hushed so soon,
And you no longer look with love on me.
This have I known always: Love is no more
Than the wide blossom which the wind assails,
Than the great tide that treads the shifting shore,
Strewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales:
Pity me that the heart is so slow to learn
What the swift mind beholds at every turn.