davidgagne.net — The personal weblog of David Vincent Gagne

They are taking so many things with them:
their sewing machines and fine china,

their ability to fold a newspaper
with one hand and swat a fly.

They are taking their rotary telephones,
and fat televisions, and knitting needles,

their cast iron frying pans, and Tupperware.
They are packing away the picnics

and perambulators, the wagons
and church socials. They are wrapped in

lipstick and big band music, dressed
in recipes. Buried with them: bathtubs

with feet, front porches, dogs without leashes.
These are the people who raised me

and now I am left behind in
a world without paper letters,

a place where the phone
has grown as eager as a weed.

I am going to miss their attics,
their ordinary coffee, their chicken

fried in lard. I would give anything
to be ten again, up late with them

in that cottage by the river, buying
Marvin Gardens and passing go,

collecting two hundred dollars.
Faith Shearin, “Telling the Bees”, 2015

I never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with a lot of pleasure.
Clarence Darrow

“A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.”
B.F. Skinner

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?
Vita Sackville-West

Remember you are just an extra in everyone else’s play.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, (b) Jan 30, 1882

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”
W. Somerset Maugham

“An atheist is a man who watches a Notre Dame–Southern Methodist University game and doesn’t care who wins.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Every man’s life ends the same way. It’s only the details of how he lived that distinguish one man from another.”
Ernest Hemingway

A real hangover is nothing to try out family remedies on. The only cure for a real hangover is death.
Robert Charles Benchley

We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.
Paul Bowles