Air Quotes - Page 103

What an unreliable thing is time--when I want it to fly, the hours stick to me like glue. And what a changeable thing, too. Time is the twine to tie our lives into parcels of years and months. Or a rubber band stretched to suit our fancy. Time can be the pretty ribbon in a little girl's hair. Or the lines in your face, stealing your youthful colour and your hair. .... But in the end, time is a noose around the neck, strangling slowly.

Watching a movie a couple of weeks ago. An American movie. I can't remember the name, but it wasn't even a sad movie. It caught me off guard. I was on an airplane.

It is better to be well deserving without praise than to live by the air of undeserved commendation.

As the plane got closer to Miami, I had this terrible feeling he was dying. Maybe he was telling me that he was going. I felt anger, panic, despair and helplessness.

To an experienced Zen Buddhist, asking if one believes in Zen or one believes in the Buddha, sounds a little ludicrous, like asking if one believes in air or water. Similarly Quality is not something you believe in, Quality is something you experience.

I don't know exactly where the ideas come from, but when I get into a songwriting mode and it's coming along, it's like you're on the front end of a boat and you're going through the water, and the breeze is blowing through your hair and the water's smooth, and you're going out to sea. I love that feeling.

A lot of people came into the airline business. Most of them promptly exited, minus their money.

Every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet. Making contact with this Wild Man is the step the Eighties male or the Nineties male has yet to take. That bucketing-out process has yet to begin in our contemporary culture.

Time after time we're told corporations should have freedom from pesky job safety regulations, environmental protections and labor standards - giving working people the freedom to be crushed in collapsing mines, choke on filthy air and get paid too little to live on.

Wherever I go, I'm watching. Even on vacation, when I'm in an airport or a railroad station, I look around, snap pictures, and find out how people do things.

Sometimes miracles come in pairs.

The highest art form of all is a human being in control of himself and his airplane in flight, urging the spirit of a machine to match his own.

I studied in London in 1968. Our school had a separate department of tropical architecture. Of course it was totally unfashionable, partly because nobody wanted to think about colonialism, but basically what you learned there was that, OK, the sun is here, so you should create natural ventilation here - an unbelievable amount of really sound principles that have been completely abandoned, so now everything is air conditioned with big machines.

You jump off a cliff and you assemble an airplane on the way down.

Despair is easy, or at least low cost.

I've heard that we come on the earth in pairs, get separated only to meet once again through marriage. So whoever is there on this earth for me, will eventually get paired with me. Till then, I'll enjoy my singlehood.

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest to bewritten, yet are they so cheap, and so things of course, that, in the infinite riches of the soul, it is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth and the whole atmosphere are ours.

Breathing is made up of two stages: inhaling, the intake of air, and exhaling, the letting out of air. The spiritual life is fed, nourished, by prayer and is expressed outwardly through mission: inhaling and exhaling. When we inhale, by prayer, we receive the fresh air of the Holy Spirit.

I had never seen a woman in such despair before. It was worse than death, it was a constant longing for death and a constant rejection of life. She lived like darkness in her own day.

That's going to be on my headstone: 'He came. He wrote 'In the Air Tonight.' He... died.'

And the rose like a nymph to the bath addrest, Which unveiled the depth of her glowing breast, Till, fold after fold, to the fainting air, The soul of her beauty and love lay bare.

Already, viral contamination offers an initial response to the question of the downside of electronic circuits, but another area of research beckons the area of ecological pollution. The pollution not only of air, water, and other substances, but also the unperceived pollution of distances.

A tendency toward the abstract is inherent in linear expression: graphic imagery being confined to outlines has a fairy-like quality and at the same time can achieve great precision.

He's like one of those weird birds in India who dissolve themselves into thin air and nip through space in a sort of disembodied way and assemble the parts again just where they want them. I've got a cousin who's what they call a Theosophist, and he says he's often nearly worked the thing himself, but couldn't quite bring it off, probably owing to having fed in his boyhood on the flesh of animals slain in anger and pie.

If there is one thing I dislike, it is the man who tries to air his grievances when I wish to air mine.