Echoing Words

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.

George Orwell

I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.

William Tecumseh Sherman

“Tell me… why were you in prison?”

“I hurt a man.”

“Why?”

“Because he hurt a child, killed a child.”

“Your child?”

“Does it matter whose child?”

Lawrence and Gina
“The Girl in the Café”

“You hang onto your pain like it means something, like it’s worth something.  Well let me tell you, it’s not worth shit.  Let it go.  Infinite possibilities and all he can do is whine.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do?”

“What do you think?  You can do anything, you lucky bastard, you’re alive!  What’s a little pain compared to that?”

“It can’t be so simple.”

“What if it is?”

Nathaniel Fisher and David Fisher
“Six Feet Under”

Oh, little darling of mine
I just can’t believe it’s so
Though it seems strange to say
I never been laid so low
In such a mysterious way
And the course of a lifetime runs
Over and over again

Paul Simon
Mother and Child Reunion

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

T.S. Eliot
The Hollow Men

I cherish the memories of a question my grandson asked me the other day when he said, “Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?”

Grandpa said, “No…but I served in a company of heroes.”

Sergeant Mike Ranney

Recounted by Major Dick Winters, Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 101st Airborne Division

I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I’d like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can’t be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.

Red
“Shawshank Redemption”

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

Theodore Roethke
The Waking

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot
The world forgetting, by the world forgot
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d

Alexander Pope
Eloisa to Abelard