Treasure Hunt

"I can't tell you just now what the moral of that is, but I shall remember it in a bit."

"Perhaps it hasn't one," Alice ventured to remark.

"Tut, tut, child!" said the Duchess.  "Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it."

                         - Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

The Answer

"'The Answer to the Great Question . . . Of Life, the Universe and Everything . . . Is . . . Forty-two,' said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm."

-Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

A Song of Contradiction

"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

-Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Excellence as Meaning

"True excellence is majestic.  It lifts us up high, where only superlatives exist.  Excellence doesn't wait; excellence requires.  In the sharing and transmission of this excellence, our souls are irresistibly animated."

- Thierry Fisher

Sister Ship

"It’s always so early in here, before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. Thank you for this life! Still I miss the alternatives. The sketches, all of them, want to become real. A ship’s engine far away on the water expands the summer-night horizon. Both joy and sorrow swell in the dew’s magnifying glass. Without really knowing, we diving; our life has a sister ship, following quietly another route. While the sun blazes behind the islands."

-Tomas Transtromer, The Blue House (translated by Goran Malmqvist)

How to Live Happily Ever After?

"It's hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst...and then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life."

-Alan Ball, American Beauty

Meditation on the Unattainable

Julie:  Simon, you cut the watermelon because you're the expert on watermelon cutting.
Simon:  Yeah, I'm the quote unquote expert (using air quotes for emphasis).
Julie:  Well, Simon! No one is perfect in the beginning.  You're learning.
Wallace:  Yeah, but no one is perfect in the end, either.