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Some Useful Thoughts


Here are a few things that might be good to think about. (But then again, they might not.) They're in no order and I am not in love with any of them and I didn't make them all up.


  1. If I say to an American that the country he lives in is a fine one, aye he replies and there is not its equal in the world. If I applaud the freedom its inhabitants enjoy he answers "freedom is a fine thing but few nations are worthy of it." If I remark on the purity of morals that distinguishes the United States he declares "I can imagine that a stranger who has witnessed the corruption which prevails in other nations would be astonished at the difference." At length I leave him to a contemplation of himself. But he returns to the charge and does not desist until he has got me to repeat all I have been saying. It is impossible to conceive of a more troublesome and garrulous patriotism. [Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America]



  2. I am convinced that there is great economy in keeping hens if we have sufficient room for them and a thorough knowledge of how to manage the fowl property. But to the professional man, who is not familiar with the habits of the hen, and whose mind does not naturally and instinctively turn henward, I would say, Shun her as you would the deadly upas tree of Piscataquis county, Me. [Bill Nye]



  3. The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animals. Some of their most esteemed inventions have no other apparent purpose, for example, the dinner party of more than two, the epic poem, and the science of metaphysics. [H. L. Mencken]



  4. I think of it as a very rare disease which, if we allow it to infect us, will grow in us and can become a very serious thing. No one likes it, but no one knows exactly what to do about it. Whatever one does is bound to make the situation worse if not better. (In any case, it's not always fatal but those who get it can be marked for life.) Certainly it exists in many different aspects of life, but only one or two are important. [Candice Roote]



  5. Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose; he has found it and will follow it! How, as a free-flowing channel, dug and torn by noble force through the sour mud- swamp of one's existence, like an ever-deepening river there, it runs and flows;--draining-off the sour festering water, gradually from the root of the remotest grass-blade; making, instead of pestilential swamp, a green fruitful meadow with its clear-flowing stream. How blessed for the meadow itself, let the stream and its value be great or small! Labor is Life: from the inmost heart of the Worker rises his god-given Force, the sacred celestial Life-essence breathed into him by Almighty God; from his inmost heart awakens him to all nobleness,--to all knowledge, "self-knowledge" and much else, so soon as Work fitly begins. Knowledge? The knowledge that will hold good in working, cleave thou to that; for Nature herself accredits that, says Yea to that. Properly thou hast no other knowledge but what thou hast got by working: the rest is yet all a hypothesis of knowledge; a thing to be argued of in schools, a thing floating in the clouds, in endless logic- vortices, till we try it and fix it. "Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by Action alone." [Thomas Carlyle, "Labor."]



  6. The chicken has to be one of nature's most maligned creatures, being a universal symbol of cowardice as well as petty harassment and general measliness. My heart goes out to the chicken. What has the chicken done to deserve this reputation? Is the chicken more cowardly than, say, the mole or the gopher? It is one of those unanswerable questions. Even the chicken's daily provender is looked upon with scorn and derision. "Chicken feed" aptly describes most of our salaries. I have never heard anyone term his paycheck "goat meal" or "squirrel food," always "chicken feed." [Jean Shepherd, "The Marathon Run of Lonesome Ernie, the Arkansas Traveler," A Fistful of Fig Newtons (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981), p. 109.]



  7. This business of conversation is a very serious matter. There are men that it weakens one to talk with an hour more than a day's fasting would do. There are men of esprit who are excessively exhausting to some people. They are the talkers that have what may be called jerky minds. Their thoughts do not run in the natural order of sequence. They say bright things on all possible subjects, but their zigzags rack you to death. After a jolting half-hour with one of these jerky companions, talking with a dull friend affords great relief. It's like taking the cat in your lap after holding a squirrel.

    What a comfort a dull but kindly person is, to be sure, at times! A ground- glass shade over a gas-lamp does not bring more solace to our dazzled eyes than such a one to our minds. [Oliver Wendell Holmes (1857)]



  8. The human heart loves corners. The very word "corner" is suggestive of snugness and cosy comfort, and he who has no liking for them is something more or less than mortal. I have seen people whose ideas of comfort were singularly crude and imperfect; who thought that it consisted in keeping a habitation painfully clean, and in having every book or paper that might give token of the place being the dwelling of a human being, carefully out of sight. We have great cause for thankfulness that such people are not common, (for a little wholesome negligence is by no means an unpleasant thing,) so that we can say that mankind generally likes to snuggify itself, and is therefore fond of a corner. This natural fondness is manifested by the child with his playthings and infantile sports, in one of which, at least, the attractions of corners for the feline race are brought strongly before his inquisitive mind. And how is this liking strengthened and built up as the child increases in secular knowledge, and learns in the course of his poetical and historical researches all about the personal history of Master John Horner, whose sedentary habits and manducation of festive pastry are famous wherever the language of Shakespeare and Milton is spoken! [Aguecheek, My Unknown Chum (NY: Devin-Adair, 1917), 235.]



  9. Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his horses, cattle and dogs before he matches them; but when he comes to his own marriage he rarely, or never, takes any such care. He is impelled by nearly the same motives as the lower animals, when they are left to their own free choice, though he is in so far superior to them that he highly values mental charms and virtues. On the other hand he is strongly attracted by mere wealth or rank. Yet he might by selection do something not only for the bodily constitution and frame of his offspring, but for their intellectual and moral qualities. Both sexes ought to refrain from marriage if they are in any marked degree inferior in body or mind; but such hopes are Utopian and will never be even partially realized until the laws of inheritance are thoroughly known. Every one does good service, who aids toward this end. When the principles of breeding and inheritance are better understood, we shall not hear ignorant members of our legislature rejecting with scorn a plan for ascertaining whether or not consanguineous marriages are injurious to man. [Charles Darwin]



  10. There is one detail of behavior at dinner parties which I have never seen touched upon in etiquette books, and which has given me some little embarrassment: What to do when you find that both your right-hand and your left-hand partner are busily engaged in conversation with somebody else.

    You have perhaps turned from your right-hand partner to snap away a rose bug which was charging on your butter from the table decorations, and when you turn back to her to continue your monologue, you find that she is already vivaciously engaged on the other side--a shift made with suspicious alacrity, when you come to think it over. So you wheel about to your left, only to find yourself confronted by an expanse of sun-browned back. This leaves you looking more or less straight in front of you, with a roll in your hand and not very much to do with your face. Should you sit and cry softly to yourself, or launch forth into a bawdy solo, beating time with your knife and fork? [Robert Benchley, "Filling That Hiatus," 1932]



  11. The Model Man never disturbs a hen when she iz setting; never speaks cross tew a lost dogg; always puts a five cent shinplaster in hiz vest pockett late Saturday night, tew hav it ready Sunday morning for the church platter; rizes whenever a lady enters the street kars; remembers your uncle plainly, and asks after all the family. If he steps on a kat's tail, is sure to do it light, and immegiately asks her pardon; reads the PHUNNY PHELLOW, and laffs bekause he kan't help it; hooks up hiz wife's dress, and plays hoss with the children. Never meddles with the cream on the milk pans; goes eazily of errands and cums back in seazon; attends everyboddy's phuneral; kan always tell when the moon changes; thinks just az yu do, or the other way if you want him to; follows evry boddy's advice but hiz own; praktices most ov the virtews without knowing it; leads the life ov a shorn lamb; gits sick after a while, and dies az soon az he kan, tew save making enny further trubble.

    The model man's vices are not feared, nor hiz virtews respekted. He lives in the memory of the world just about az long az a pleasant day duz.

    He may be called a "clever feller," and that iz only a libel; but he will git hiz reward hereafter--when the birds get theirs. [Josh Billings, sometime in the late 1800s]



  12. Even our boasted educational system is half a Humbug. Too many of our professors fondly imagine that when they have crammed the dry formulas of half a dozen sciences into a small head--perhaps designed by the Deity to furnish the directive wisdom for a scavenger cart; when they have taught a two-legged mon-calf to glibly read in certain dead languages things it can in nowise comprehend--patiently pumped into it a whole congeries of things that defy its mental digestive apparatus--that it is actually educated, if not enlightened. And perhaps it is--after the manner of the trick mule or the pig that plays cards. The attempt of Gulliver scientists to calcine ice into gunpowder were not more ridiculous than trying to transform a fool into a philosopher by the alchemy of education. If it be a waste of lather to shave an ass, what must it be to educate an idiot? True education consists in the acquirement of useful information; yet I have seen college graduates-- even men sporting professional sheepskins--who couldn't tell whether Gladstone's an English statesman or an Irish policeman. They knew all about Greek roots but couldn't tell a carrot from a parsnip. They could decipher a cuneiform inscription, perhaps, and state whether a pebble belonged to the paleozoic or some other period; but couldn't tell a subpoena from a search-warrant, a box of vermicelli from a bundle of fishworms.

    We pore over books too much and reflect too little; depend too much on others, too little upon ourselves. We make of our heads cold-storage warehouses for other people's ideas, instead of standing up in our own independent, god-like individuality. Bacon says that reading makes a full man. Perhaps so, but it makes a great deal of difference what a fellow's full of. Too many who fondly imagine themselves educated, much resemble Mark Twain's frog with its stomach full of shot--they are crushed to earth by the things they have swallowed.

    Neither the public nor any other school system has ever produced one really great man. Those who occupy the dais-throne among the immortals, contended single-handed with the darkness of ignorance and the devil of dogmatism. Columbus scorned the schools and discovered a world. Napoleon revolutionized the science of war and made himself master of Europe. Bismarck mocked at precedent, and United Germany stood forth a giant. Jesus of Nazareth ignored the learning of the Levites, and around the world arose the fanes of a new faith.

    Reading is the nurse of culture; reflection the mother of genius. Our great religions were born in the desert. Our grandest philosophers budded and burgeoned in the wilderness. The noblest poesy that ever swept the human harpsichord was born in the brain of the beggar, came bubbling from the heart of the blind; and when all the magi of the Medes, and all the great philosophers of Greece had failed to furnish forth a jurisprudence just to all, semi-barbarous Rome laid down those laws by which, even from the grave of her glory, she still rules the majestic world.

    I have been accused of being the enemy of education; but then I have been accused of almost everything; so one count more or less in the indictment doesn't matter. I am not opposed to education that is useful; but why should we pay people to fill the empty heads of fools with soap and sawdust? [Brann, the Iconoclast]



  13. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.--"Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood." Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. [Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance]



  14. The Husbandman

    Let the farmer, so far as I am concerned, be damned forever. To Hell with him, and bad luck to him. He is a tedious fraud and ignoramus, a cheap rogue and hypocrite, the eternal Jack of the human pack. He deserves all that he ever suffers under our economic system, and more. Any city man, not insane, who sheds tears for him is shedding the tears of the crocodile. [H.L. Mencken]



  15. While I sit at the kitchen counter, I think of fruit and other things.

    Some fruit are round and others are less round.

    You can race a dog in a biscuit, but you can't fry a fruit in a dog. That's why you should know where the dog has been and where the apple is. Everyone looks at the inside of a fruit but few see the inside of a dog. Know your fruit and you will not need to know much about your dog. That much I know.

    Know a fruit and you will know a fruit. That much I know.

    Never ask much of fruit. That too.

    Life is so . . . is so round. Is so yellow. Is so tart and crisp and shaped in a basket on a linen napkin. Life is fruit. Life is the fruit basket. Life is the linen napkin.

    The longer I wonder about that piece of pie next to the refrigerator, the longer I think that today is the day to think of pie. The pie is still next to the refrigerator. The pie is next to the refrigerator when it could just as well be next to the stove. The pie can always be someplace else. Why would you put fruit in a pie and leave it next to the refrigerator when you could just as easily leave it someplace else? I worry about such things. I worry. Why would you put fruit in a pie when you don't know where you're going to leave it? Worry comes from thinking too hard about things that bother you enough to cause a disturbance in the mind. Worry comes from a disturbance in the mind unless it comes from brain waves in transit. But if you really want to know, I don't know where worry comes from and that worries me. Life may be more than fruit. But how much? How much? Life is more than a banana. But how much? I worry. Sometimes the only thoughts that mean anything are more or less my own. And sometimes, they're more or less someone else's. And sometimes they come from someplace else or certain places. And that should bother me, too. I worry about that, if you really want to know. [Alan Fobbs, Fall, 1987, Annaheim, California]



  16. All about us, living in our very families, it may be, there exists a race of curious creatures. Outwardly, they possess no marked peculiarities; in fact, at a hasty glance, they may be readily mistaken for regular human beings. They are built after the popular design; they have the usual number of features, arranged in the conventional manner; they offer no variations on the general run of things in their habits of dressing, eating, and carrying on their business.

    Yet, between them and the rest of the civilized world, there stretches an impassable barrier. Though they live in the very thick of the human race, they are forever isolated from it. They are fated to go through life, congenital pariahs. They live out their little lives, mingling with the world, yet never a part of it.

    They are, in short, Good Souls.

    And the piteous thing about them is that they are wholly unconscious of their condition . . . [Dorothy Parker]



  17. I limp down this corridor. Life. Hobbled by the hobblers of my part human instincts to preserve, to keep, to encrust the ugly in gold. I look around. They stand there, likenesses of furred animals stuck in plaster. Life caught at an angle, souls hobbled, leaning clawed hands to brush my arms as I pass. The quest here is useless, but it gives food for thought. The stuffed, overstuffed world with its claim to bodies preserves the outward, but with hobbled hearts. A gourd is hollow within, but it keeps forever. A stuffed deer keeps his ears perky forever, preserved in this glass cabinet. I hear clubfoots follow down the corridor. One lame like me. Ugly. Preserver of life's gourds. Life that refuses to rot. [H.Z. Zilch, The Greenest Watermelon]



  18. A man and his Hobby-Horse, tho' I cannot say that they act and re-act exactly after the same manner in which the soul and body do upon each other: Yet doubtless there is a communication between them of some kind, and my opinion rather is, that there is something in it more of the manner of electrified bodies,--------and that by means of the heated parts of the rider, which come immediately into contact with the back of the Hobby-Horse. ---------By long journies and much friction, it so happens that the body of the rider is at length fill'd as full of Hobby-Horsical matter as it can hold; ----------so that if you are able to give but a clear description of the nature of the one, you may form a pretty exact notion of the genius and character of the other. [Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy]



  19. I'm torn: I want anonymous glory, effect without impact, community without neighbors, satisfaction without complacency, nudity without nakedness. On the street I see my options: become a clown, reveling in absurdity, revealing the humor in tragedy, painting on a smile, cultivating a tear; become a gadfly, sniffing out the dirty secrets of the sanctimonious, revealing them to the world at large; saying to hell with it, adopting stray animals, because they're so much better than humans, grateful, loving; join the homeless, tear up my clothes, sleep in urine-stinking doorways, fight off assorted molesters and small, biting insects while providing constant, tacit commentary on the unfairness of the world passing by; dedicate myself to one small, important cause and working on it until even a single ray of light has been shed on even a single person's misery, and be content; landscape the front yard into a perfectly designed hill and a boulder of the perfect weight, size and shape, becoming a modern Sisyphus, upbraiding the neighbors and revealing the human condition by daily rolling my boulder up the hill to near the summit, then chasing it futile back down; buy a wheelchair, a bag to piss and shit in, break all the joints on my fingers and smash my teeth with a chisel to learn what a joy any small happiness really is; write murder mysteries, accepting the voyeuristic glee people take in both the crime and the perfect eye-for-an-eye vengeance wreaked by a knight in a cheap suit; perfect a martial art and become a modern subway hero; retire to academia and philsophize from a safe distance on the rabble below; become one with the rabble below; make coffee tables in the basement; howl execrations at the crowd as the blade slides toward my neck; find pleasure in toothache; follow a twelve-step program; write about the stupidity of twelve-step programs; fart in elevators.

    You'll be hearing from me. [Paul Hoornbeek, "Tinkerbell's Tits"]



  20. The most interesting dwellings in this country, as the painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble log huts and cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the inhabitants whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in their surfaces, merely, which makes them picturesque; and equally interesting will be the citizen's suburban box, when his life shall be as simple and as agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little straining after effect in the style of his dwelling. [Henry David Thoreau, "My House"]



  21. "Some people" like to make other people (even their friends) feel guilty--some people even like to make other people look like they don't care about other people or other people's feelings, or about the refuse piling up behind their door. Some people like to spend their time making other people feel like they should be doing something even though it is morally reprehensible and INAUTHENTIC for them to be doing that thing. Some people better spend their time attending cultural events on campus which other people only encourage them to do in THEIR BEST INTERESTS, not in the effort to make some people feel guilty about being culturally impoverished and thereby depriving their children of appropriate dinner conversation.

    Some people feel that other people by not claiming contest PRIZES therefore do not appreciate the contest or the giver of the prize. Some people have fallen so far into inauthenticity and everydayness that the true revealed character of Hubbard is lost upon them. They do not realize that what they have done is made Hubbard the OBJECT whose being is to them disclosed in "having been picked up by the winner" or in "having been made into squash pie." A study of the temporal meaning of the way in which circumspective concern becomes modified in the theoretical discovery of the present-at-hand-within-the-world is now our primordial Concern. Some people treat Hubbard as present-at-hand or ready-to-hand. As object. As mean. Not as end. Some people have not seen revealed the primordial nature of VICTORY which needs authentically only the knowledge, not the facticity of PRIZE. When Hubbard is thought of as PRIZE it becomes object not subject. Hubbard is primordially that which knows it has to die and asks "Why?" not that which primordially has to be-won and asks "When?" [Carole Cunningham]



  22. It seems to me that the whole scheme of salvation depends on having a required modicum of intelligence. People are born fools and damned for not being wiser. I often say over to myself the verse, 'O God, be merciful to me a fool,' the fallacy of which to mind (you won't agree with me) is in the 'me,' that it looks on man as a little God over against the universe, instead of as a cosmic ganglion, a momentary intersection of what humanly speaking we call streams of energy, such as gives white light at one point and the power of making syllogisms at another, but always an inseverable part of the unimaginable, in which we live and move and have our being, no more needing its mercy than my little toe needs mine. It will be well if the intelligent classes could forget the word sin and think less of being good. We learn how to behave as lawyers, soldiers, merchants, or what not by being them. Life, not the parson, teaches conduct. [Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., to Pollock, 1926. [Dunno who Pollock is.] --from The Practical Cogitator: The Thinker's Anthology ed. Charles P. Curtis, Jr. and Ferris Greenslet, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1945.]



  23. Having mentioned laughing, I must particularly warn you against it: and I could heartily wish that you may often be seen to smile, but never heard to laugh while you live. Frequent and loud laughter is the characteristic of folly and ill manners; it is the manner in which the mob express their silly joy at silly things; and they call it being merry. In my mind, there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill bred, as audible laughter. True wit, or sense, never yet made any body laugh; they are above it. They please the mind, and give a cheerfulness to the countenance. But it is low buffoonery, or silly accidents, that always excite laughter; and that is what people of sense and breeding should show themselves above. A man's going to sit down, in the supposition that he has a chair behind him, and falling down upon his breech for want of one, sets a whole company a laughing, when all the wit in the world would not do it; a plain proof, in my mind, how low and unbecoming a laughing is. Not to mention the disagreeable noise that it makes, and the shocking distortion of the face that it occasions. Laughter is easily restrained, by a very little reflection; but as it is generally connected with the idea of gaiety, people do not enough attend to its absurdity. I am neither of a melancholy nor a cynical disposition; and am as willing and as apt to be pleased as any body; but I am sure that, since I have had the full use of my reason, nobody has ever heard me laugh. [Lord Chesterfield, Letters to His Son.]



  24. It is not the life of a sandwedge or sandpiper or millionaire-- not even if it includes a lean to the earth and free bus tickets to any city in the West and well being too--but a single singular motion of the mind and soul--the clasping of hands and moaning and flinging of the fingers as if shedding water from the sink that brings peace and control to our enterprises. Without this, politics will remain equally able to give us notoriety and outward success and shoemaking shoes, and weaving hats; cows will continue to go to pasture and silence will remain golden; but without handclasping and moaning and the flinging of the fingers as with wet hands at the sink, all such enterprises will remain essentially out of our control and unpeaceful. [Pol Rhinehardt]



  25. Why is not a rat as good as a rabbit? Why should men eat shrimps and neglect cockroaches? [H. W. Beecher, Eyes and Ears, 1862]



  26. If a body met a body in a bag of beans,
    Can a body tell a body what a body means?

    [Rhyme from They Say in New England]



  27. If I were to choose the sites, the sounds, the fragrances I most would want to see and hear and smell--among the delights of the open road--on the Fourth of July, I think I would choose these: the clear, ethereal sound of people going the other way; the lonely calling of a flat b-flat trumpet someplace else; single footsteps in the melted snow; and--most spiritual and moving of sights--Yanglang translating macadam into featureless cobbles by herself. [Pol Rhinehardt.]



  28. We think so because all other people think so;
    Or because--or because--after all, we do think so;
    Or because we were told so, and think we must think so;
    Or because we were told so, and think we must think so;
    Or because we once thought so, and think we still think so;
    Or because, having thought so, we think we will think so.

    [Ascribed to Henry Sidgwick (1838-1901)] [quoted by H. L. Mencken in his Dictionary of Quotations



  29. One of the worst diseases to which the human creature is liable is its disease of thinking. If it would only just look at a thing instead of thinking what it must be like, or do a thing, instead of thinking it cannot be done, we should all get on far better. [John Ruskin, The Political Economy of Art, 1857] [quoted by H. L. Mencken in his New Dictionary of Quotations]



  30. The Model Boy of my time--we never had but the one--was perfect: perfect in manners, perfect in dress, perfect in conduct, perfect in filial piety, perfect in exterior godliness; but at bottom he was a prig; and as for the contents of his skull, they could have changed place with the contents of a pie, and nobody would have been the worse off for it but the pie. This fellow's reproachlessness was a standing reproach to every lad in the village. He was the admiration of all the mothers, and the detestation of all their sons. I was told what became of him, but as it was a disappointment to me, I will not enter into details. He succeeded in life. [Mark Twain]



  31. "My female frends," sed I, "be4 you leeve, I've a few remarks to remark; wa them well. The female woman is one of the greatest institooshuns of which this land can boste. It's onpossible to get along without her. Had there bin no female wimin in the world, I should scarcely be here with my unparalleld show on this very occashun. She is good in sickness--good in wellness--good all the time. O, woman! woman!" I cried, my feelins worked up to a hi poetick pitch, "you air an angle when you behave yourself; but when you take off your proper appairel & (mettyforically speaken) get into pantyloons--when you desert your firesides, & with your heds full of wimin's rites noshuns go round like roarin lyons, seekin whom you may devour someboddy--in short, when you undertake to play the man, you play the devil and air an emfatic noosance. My female friends," I continnered, as they were indignantly departin, "wa well what A. Ward has sed!" [Artemis Ward]



  32. Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise. [Old Lewis Carroll saying]



  33. As a Wife Has a Cow: A Love Story, by Gertrude Stein

    Nearly all of it to be as a wife has a cow, a love story. All of it to be as a wife has a cow, all of it to be as a wife has a cow, a love story.

    As to be all of it as to be a wife as a wife has a cow, a love story, all of it as to be all of it as a wife all of it as to be as a wife has a cow a love story, all of it as a wife has a cow as a wife has a cow a love story.

    Has made, as it has made as it has made, has made has to be as a wife has a cow, a love story. Has made as to be as a wife has a cow a love story. As a wife has a cow, as a wife has a cow, a love story. Has to be as a wife has a cow a love story. Has made as to be as a wife has a cow a love story.

    When he can, and for that when he can, for that. When he can and for that when he can. For that. When he can. For that when he can. For that. And when he can and for that. Or that, and when he can. For that and when he can.

    And to in six and another. And to and in and six and another. And to and in and six and another. And to in six and and to and in and six and another. And to and in and six and another. And to and six and in and another and and to and six and another and and to and in and six and and to and six and in and another.

    In came in there, came in there come out of there. In came in come out of there. Come out there in came in there. Come out of there and in and come out of there. Came in there, come out of there.

    Feeling or for it, as feeling or for it, came in or come in, or come out of there or feeling as feeling or feeling as for it.

    As a wife has a cow.

    Came in and come out.

    As a wife has a cow a loves tory.

    As a love story, as a wife has a cow, a love story.

    Not and now, now and not, not and now, by and by not and now, as not, as soon as not not and now, now as soon now now as soon, now as soon as soon as now. Just as soon just now just now just as soon just as soon as now. Just as soon as now.

    And in that, as and in that, in that and and in that, so that, so that and in that, and in that and so that and as for that and as for that and that. In that. In that and and for that as for that and in that. Just as soon and in that. In that as that and just as soon. Just as soon as that.

    Even now, now and even now and now and even now. Not as even now, therefor, even now and therefor, therefor and even now and even now and therefor even now. So not to and moreover and even now and therefor and moreover and even now and so and even now and therefor even now.

    Do they as they do so. And do they do so.

    We feel we feel. We feel or if we feel if we feel or if we feel. We feel or if we feel. As it is made made a day made a day or two made a day, as it is made a day or two, as it is made a day. Made a day. Made a day. Not away a day. By day. As it is made a day.

    On the fifteenth of October as they say, said anyway, what is it as they expect, as they expect it or as they expected it, as they expect it and as they expected it, expect it or for it, expected it and it is expected of it. As they say said anyway. What is it as they expect for it, what is it and it is as they expect of it. What is it. What is it the fifteenth of October as they say as they expect or as they expected as they expect for it. What is it as they say the fifteenth of October as they say and as expected of it, the fifteenth of October as they say, what is it as expected of it. What is it and the fifteenth of October as they say and expected of it.

    And prepare and prepare so prepare to prepare and prepare to prepare and prepare so as to prepare, so to prepare and prepare to prepare to prepare for and to prepare for it to prepare, to prepare for it, in preparation, as preparation in preparation by preparation. They will be too busy afterwards to prepare. As preparation prepare, to prepare, as to preparation and to prepare. Out there.

    Have it as having having it as happening, happening to have it as having, having to have it as happening. Happening and have it as happening and having it happen as happening and having to have it happen as happening, and my wife has a cow as now, my wife having a cow as now, my wife having a cow as now and having a cow as now and having a cow and having a cow now, my wife has a cow and now. My wife has a cow.

    [Published in Paris in 1926 with lithographic illustrations by Juan Gris.]



    I don't have nothing only words to put down on paper. Its so hard. Some times theres mor in the emty paper nor there is when you get the writing down on it. You try to word the big things and they tern ther backs on you. Yet youwl see stanning stoans and ther backs wil talk to you. The living stoan wil all ways have the living wood in it I know that. With the hart of the chyld in it which that hart of the chyld is in that same and very thing what lives inside us and afeart of being beartht. . . . If you cud even jus only put your self right with 1 stoan . . . . If you cud even jus only put your self right with 1 stoan youwd be moving with the girt dants of the every thing the 1 Big 1 the Master Chaynjis. Then you myt have the res of it or not. The boats in the air or what ever. What ever you don wud be right. [Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker]


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