#ria

The gods have been good to you. But what the gods give they quickly take away. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats. Every month as it wanes bring you nearer to something dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#time #youth #beauty

Graves aren't for the dead. They're for the loved ones the dead leave behind them. Once those loved ones have gone, once all the lives that have touched the occupant of any given grave had ended, then the grave's purpose was fulfilled and ended. I suppose if you looked at it that way, one might as well decorate one's grave with an enormous statue or a giant temple. It gave people something to talk about, at least. Although, following that logic, I would need to have a roller coaster, or maybe a Tilt-A-Whirl constructed over my own grave when I died. Then even after my loved ones had moved on, people could keep having fun for years and years. Of course, I'd need a slightly larger plot. ↗

— Jim Butcher

#graves #memorial #death

Sex and obscenity are not synonymous. Obscene material is material which deals with sex in a manner appealing to prurient interest. ↗

— William J. Brennan, Jr.

#deals #interest #manner #material #obscene

In my experience sometimes the darker the material that you're doing, the more necessary it is to have some sort of levity around. I've worked on more lighthearted pieces that have been more brutal and tougher to make. ↗

— Nick Stahl

#been #brutal #darker #doing #experience

The goal, I submit, is obvious: subjugating the world (which is barbarian, dangerous, envious and ungrateful) to US power for the sake of America's interests. ↗

— Breyten Breytenbach

#barbarian #dangerous #envious #goal #i

It is death that goes down to the center of the earth, the great burial church the earth is, and then to the curved ends of the universe, as light is said to do. ↗

— Harold Brodkey

#center #church #curved #death #down

We've got to search back to our last known safe landmark. I can't say exactly where, but I think it's back there at the start of the Industrial Revolution, we began applying energy in vast amounts to tools with which we began tearing the environment apart. ↗

— David R. Brower

#applying #back #began #energy #environment

Cage's Music of Changes was a further indication that the arts in general were beginning to consciously deal with the "given" material and, to varying degrees, liberating them from the inherited, functional concepts of control. ↗

— Earle Brown

#beginning #cage #changes #concepts #consciously

Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get. ↗

— H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

#care #children #flower #gardens #get

Marrying an old bachelor is like buying second-hand furniture. ↗

— H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

#bachelor #buying #furniture #like #marrying