Q: "What is the burning question on the mind of every dyslexic
existentialist?"
A: "Is there a dog?"
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear--not absence of fear. Except a
creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely
a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!--incomparably the
bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage.
Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact
that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth
to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the
very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more
afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by
an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam
as men who "didn't know what fear was," we ought always to add the flea--and
put him at the head of the procession.
-- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
My dear People.
My dear Bagginses and Boffins, and my dear Tooks and Brandybucks,
and Grubbs, and Chubbs, and Burrowses, and Hornblowers, and Bolgers,
Bracegirdles, Goodbodies, Brockhouses and Proudfoots. Also my good
Sackville Bagginses that I welcome back at last to Bag End. Today is my
one hundred and eleventh birthday: I am eleventy-one today!"
-- J. R. R. Tolkien
Gone With The Wind LITE(tm)
-- by Margaret Mitchell
A woman only likes men she can't have and the South gets trashed.
Gift of the Magi LITE(tm)
-- by O. Henry
A husband and wife forget to register their gift preferences.
The Old Man and the Sea LITE(tm)
-- by Ernest Hemingway
An old man goes fishing, but doesn't have much luck.
Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails,
whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through
the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush!
-- Captain Ahab, "Moby Dick"