Quotes: Broken Back

"...I would charitably refer that man to the history of Christendom for the last 1800 years; & ask him, whether, in spite of all the maxims of Christ, that history is not just as full of blood, violence, wrong, & iniquity of every kind, as any previous portion of the world's story?"
-Herman Melville, Plotinus Plinlimmon in Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities (1852)

"Enitharmon slept,
Eighteen hundred years: Man was a Dream!
The night of Nature and their harps unstrung:
She slept in middle of her nightly song,
Eighteen hundred years, a female dream!"

-William Blake, Europe: A Prophecy

"I want to make sure I'm dancing and not shuffling."
-Dave Chappelle, on being a black comedian enjoyed by a large white audience

"I like my buddies from west Texas. I liked them when I was young, I liked them when I was middle-age, I liked them before I was president, and I like them during president, and I like them after president."
-George W. Bush, 2005

"At the age of ten, they had furnished an example of the truth, that the friendship of fine-hearted, generous boys, nurtured amid the romance-engendering comforts & elegancies of life, sometimes, transcends the bounds of mere boyishness, & revels for a while in the empyrean of a love which only comes short, by one degree, of the sweetest sentiment entertained between the sexes. Nor is this boy-love without the occasional fillips & spicinesses, which at times, by an apparent abatement, enhance the permanent delights of those more advanced lovers who love beneath the cestus of Venus."
-Herman Melville, Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities (1852)

"Nearly 60 years ago, Leslie Fiedler argued that the great American novels of the 19th century dramatize a love story between men, typically a white man and a man of color: Ishmael and Queequeg, Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, Huck and Jim. He made his brilliant academic career on this startling thesis, which he went on to demonstrate in "Love and Death in the American Novel" in 1960. Now Fiedler's thesis seems to apply to Hollywood movies as well, but the thorough close-readings that have refined and broadened Fiedler's argument this time have been provided not by graduate students, but by online pranksters using little more than laptops, a broadband connection and Final Cut Pro. "
-Virginia Heffernan, on Internet "Brokeback Mountain" spoofs, in the March 2nd New York Times

"...even if it means taking a chubby, I will suck it up."
-Tobias Fünke, from Arrested Development