Current Events!
Hello everyone! Sorry to have been gone so long. I was so happy to see and read the posts made since I converted this from a primarily challenge-based community. But everyone loves challenges, right? So why don't we run one? Or... two. :)
The 25 Quote Challenge: Below the cut, I've listed 50 quotes. To complete the challenge (and receive a nifty award) you must use 25 of these in fics, ficlets, art, fancomics, whatever. This challenge is open-ended and can be completed at any time. Awards will all be unique. And of course, the awards for using MORE than 25, all the way up to 50, are even cooler. ;)
1. "Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up." --James Baldwin
2. Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.
--Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742 - 1799)
3. I'd hang you from the nipples, but you'd shock the children. --Eleanor of Aquitaine (to a necklace), The Lion in Winter
4. The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it. --George Orwell (1903 - 1950), Polemic, May 1946, "Second Thoughts on James Burnham"
5. The opposite of love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together-the lover with the loved, the one who hates with the hated. Both passions are tested by separation. --John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, ch. 2, Pantheon
6. It is folly to punish your neighbor by fire when you live next door. --Publilius Syrus
7. I have made my world and it is a much better world than I ever saw outside.
--Louise Nevelson (1900 - 1988)
8. Order is the shape upon which beauty depends. --Pearl Buck (1892 - 1973)
9. Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.
--J. R. R. Tolkien
10. Hierarchical institutions are like giant bulldozers-- obedient to the whim of any fool who takes the controls. --Edward Abbey (1927 - 1989)
11. I will be a wise and tolerant monarch, dispensing justice fairly, and only setting nightmares to rip out the minds of the evil and wicked. Or just anybody I don't like.
--John Dee, in SANDMAN #7: "Sound and Fury"
12. The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me. --George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)
13. To know one's self, one must go all the way to horror. --Jacques Bossuet (1627 - 1704)
14. He who has injured thee was stronger or weaker than thee. If weaker, spare him; if stronger, spare thyself. --Seneca
15. Once she left the crimson terraces,
there was nothing but endless desert;
only her evergreen grave is left
to face the twilight.
--Du Fu, tr. David Lunde
16. When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it . . . and it is all one. --M. F. K. Fisher
17. Boys are beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years. --James Thurber
18. Here is your finger, with an emerald on it:
The one I gave you. I say these things politely--
But what I think beneath them, who can tell?
For I think of you, crumpled against a whiteness;
Flayed and torn, with a dulled face.
I think of you, writhing, a thing of scarlet,
And myself, rising red from that embrace.
--Conrad Aiken, Red is the Color of Blood
19. You like buttercups, dewy sweet,
And crocuses, framed in snow;
I like roses, born of the heat,
And the red carnation's glow.
--Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Advice
20. In battling evil, excess is good; for he who is moderate in announcing the truth is presenting half-truth. He conceals the other half out of fear of the people's wrath.
--Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931), 'Narcotics and Dissecting Knives'
21. Lie to yourself if you have to, but never to me. --Unknown
22. Our love is like Byzantium
must have been
on the last evening. There must have been
I imagine
a glow on the faces
of those who crowded the streets
or stood in small groups
on streetcorners and public squares
speaking together in low voices
that must have resembled
the glow your face has
when you brush your hair back
and look at me.
I imagine they haven't spoken
much, and about rather
ordinary things
that they have been trying to say
and have stopped
without having managed to express
what they wanted
and have been trying again
and given up again
and have been loking at each other
and lowered their eyes.
Very old icons, for instance,
have that kind of glow
the blaze of a burning city
or the glow which approaching death
leaves on photographs of people who died young
in the memory of those left behind.
When I turn towards you
in bed, I have a feeling
of stepping into a church
that was burned down long ago
and where only the darkness in the eyes of the icons
has remained
filled with the flames
which annihilated them.
--Henrik Nordbrandt
(translated by Henrik Nordbrandt and Alexander Taylor)
23. The Devil finds work for idle hands. --Proverb, 1721
24. The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
--Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, an existentialist short essay
25. 'Every man has his price.' This is not true. But for every man there exists a bait which he cannot resist swallowing. To win over certain people to something, it is only necessary to give it a gloss of love of humanity, nobility, gentleness, self-sacrifice - and there is nothing you cannot get them to swallow. To their souls, these are the icing, the tidbit; other kinds of souls have others. --Friedrich Nietzsche
26. Three things have been difficult to tame: the oceans, fools and women. We may soon be able to tame the oceans; fools and women will take a little longer. --Spiro T. Agnew
27. Beauty is a crime.
Even a smile is a crime.
Black rose, just as you have thorns
I will gently swallow it and go.
Try to see the pain in my eyes.
Surely you won't be able to leave me.
I am not loved. There is no one.
I am not loved. There is no one.
--Utsukushisa wa tsumi, writer unknown (tr. by malefics)
28. People's personalities, like buildings, have various facades, some pleasant to view, some not. --La Rochefoucauld
29. As records of courts and justice are admissible, it can easily be proved that powerful and malevolent magicians once existed and were a scourge to mankind. The evidence (including confession) upon which certain women were convicted of witchcraft and executed was without a flaw; it is still unimpeachable. The judges' decisions based on it were sound in logic and in law. Nothing in any existing court was ever more thoroughly proved than the charges of witchcraft and sorcery for which so many suffered death. If there were no witches, human testimony and human reason are alike destitute of value. --Ambrose Bierce
30. Don't think you can attain total awareness and whole enlightenment without proper discipline and practice. This is egomania. Appropriate rituals channel your emotions and life energy toward the light. Without the discipline to practice them, you will tumble constantly backward into darkness. --Lao-Tzu
31. Sex is the one thing you cannot really swindle; and it is the centre of the worst swindling of all, emotional swindling.... Sex lashes out against counterfeit emotion, and is ruthless, devastating against false love. --D. H. Lawrence
32. I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus
With tigery stripes, and a face on it
Round as the moon, to stare up.
I want to be looking at them when they come
Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots.
I see them already-the pale, star-distance faces.
Now they are nothing, they are not even babies.
I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods.
They will wonder if I was important.
--Sylvia Plath, "Last Words"
33. Being always overavid, I demand from those I love a love equal to mine, which, being balanced people, they cannot supply. --Sylvia Ashton-Warner
34. Friendship is like a prism through which the many variations of beauty are revealed in our lives. --Anon.
35. What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. --T.S. Eliot, "Four Quartets"
36. How do you know that you're right if you're not nervous anymore? --The Killers, Bling (Confession of a King)
37. Everything beautiful has its moment and then passes away. --Cernuda y Bidon
38. A standing prick has no conscience. --English proverb
39. When the scary things are scared, it's bad. --Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV show)
40. I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
--John Adams, Letter to Abigail Adams
41. I am in blood stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er. --William Shakespeare, MacBeth
42. I give thanks to the earth
For having waited
For me
At the hour in which the sky and the ocean
come together like two lips
because this is not a small thing, is it? to have lived
through one solitude and to have arrived at another,
to feel that one is many things and to rediscover oneself.
I love all things
and of all the fires
only love never goes out,
for this reason I go from life to life,
from guitar to guitar,
and I am not afraid
of the light or of the shadow,
and because I am made almost of pure earth
I have enough spoons for infinity.
--Pablo Neruda, Aqui vivimos (tr. by Amy)
43. We kill everybody, my dear. Some with bullets, some with words, and everybody with our deeds. We drive people into their graves, and neither see it nor feel it. --Maxim Gorky
44. And who would have thought a cup of coffee
Would make my legs unstable
Shaking under the table
Must be stage fright.
--Blue October, Mr. Blue's Menu
45. "I spent two years on every street in hell." "That's odd. I didn't see you there."
--Philip and Richard, the Lion in Winter
46. Thus we may know that there are five essentials for victory:
(1) He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.
(2) He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces.
(3) He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks.
(4) He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared.
(5) He will win who has military capacity and is not interfered with by the sovereign.
Hence the saying: If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself you will succumb in every battle. --Sun-Tzu, The Art of War [Tr. Lionel Giles]
47. I can't run no more with that lawless crowd
While the killers in high places say their prayers out loud
But they've summoned, they've summoned up a thundercloud
They're going to hear from me.
--Leonard Cohen, Anthem
48. It is a pain in the ass waiting around for someone to try to kill you. --Roger Zelazny, The Trumps of Doom
49. Wizards in trousers? Not in my damn university. It's sissy. People'd laugh. -Terry Pratchett, Soul Magic
50. Love is the emblem of eternity: it confounds all notion of time: effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end. --Germaine De Stael
Love Never Dead Holiday Exchange I: Is just what it sounds like. A fic exchange. For now, you can use this thread to sign up. You can make them private or not, as you choose.
Tell me what pairings you prefer to receive (and remember, at least one Founder must be involved), what rating, subject matter, scenarios or kinks if you have them. Also list what you're comfortable giving in return, whether it be art or fic, which pairings, what ratings, and anything you definitely don't want to receive or to write/draw.
Since this is our first exchange I don't expect it to be very large, but everyone loves receiving gift work! All participants will receive a few stocking stuffers. ;)
The 25 Quote Challenge: Below the cut, I've listed 50 quotes. To complete the challenge (and receive a nifty award) you must use 25 of these in fics, ficlets, art, fancomics, whatever. This challenge is open-ended and can be completed at any time. Awards will all be unique. And of course, the awards for using MORE than 25, all the way up to 50, are even cooler. ;)
1. "Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up." --James Baldwin
2. Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.
--Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742 - 1799)
3. I'd hang you from the nipples, but you'd shock the children. --Eleanor of Aquitaine (to a necklace), The Lion in Winter
4. The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it. --George Orwell (1903 - 1950), Polemic, May 1946, "Second Thoughts on James Burnham"
5. The opposite of love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together-the lover with the loved, the one who hates with the hated. Both passions are tested by separation. --John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, ch. 2, Pantheon
6. It is folly to punish your neighbor by fire when you live next door. --Publilius Syrus
7. I have made my world and it is a much better world than I ever saw outside.
--Louise Nevelson (1900 - 1988)
8. Order is the shape upon which beauty depends. --Pearl Buck (1892 - 1973)
9. Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.
--J. R. R. Tolkien
10. Hierarchical institutions are like giant bulldozers-- obedient to the whim of any fool who takes the controls. --Edward Abbey (1927 - 1989)
11. I will be a wise and tolerant monarch, dispensing justice fairly, and only setting nightmares to rip out the minds of the evil and wicked. Or just anybody I don't like.
--John Dee, in SANDMAN #7: "Sound and Fury"
12. The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me. --George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)
13. To know one's self, one must go all the way to horror. --Jacques Bossuet (1627 - 1704)
14. He who has injured thee was stronger or weaker than thee. If weaker, spare him; if stronger, spare thyself. --Seneca
15. Once she left the crimson terraces,
there was nothing but endless desert;
only her evergreen grave is left
to face the twilight.
--Du Fu, tr. David Lunde
16. When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it . . . and it is all one. --M. F. K. Fisher
17. Boys are beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years. --James Thurber
18. Here is your finger, with an emerald on it:
The one I gave you. I say these things politely--
But what I think beneath them, who can tell?
For I think of you, crumpled against a whiteness;
Flayed and torn, with a dulled face.
I think of you, writhing, a thing of scarlet,
And myself, rising red from that embrace.
--Conrad Aiken, Red is the Color of Blood
19. You like buttercups, dewy sweet,
And crocuses, framed in snow;
I like roses, born of the heat,
And the red carnation's glow.
--Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Advice
20. In battling evil, excess is good; for he who is moderate in announcing the truth is presenting half-truth. He conceals the other half out of fear of the people's wrath.
--Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931), 'Narcotics and Dissecting Knives'
21. Lie to yourself if you have to, but never to me. --Unknown
22. Our love is like Byzantium
must have been
on the last evening. There must have been
I imagine
a glow on the faces
of those who crowded the streets
or stood in small groups
on streetcorners and public squares
speaking together in low voices
that must have resembled
the glow your face has
when you brush your hair back
and look at me.
I imagine they haven't spoken
much, and about rather
ordinary things
that they have been trying to say
and have stopped
without having managed to express
what they wanted
and have been trying again
and given up again
and have been loking at each other
and lowered their eyes.
Very old icons, for instance,
have that kind of glow
the blaze of a burning city
or the glow which approaching death
leaves on photographs of people who died young
in the memory of those left behind.
When I turn towards you
in bed, I have a feeling
of stepping into a church
that was burned down long ago
and where only the darkness in the eyes of the icons
has remained
filled with the flames
which annihilated them.
--Henrik Nordbrandt
(translated by Henrik Nordbrandt and Alexander Taylor)
23. The Devil finds work for idle hands. --Proverb, 1721
24. The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
--Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, an existentialist short essay
25. 'Every man has his price.' This is not true. But for every man there exists a bait which he cannot resist swallowing. To win over certain people to something, it is only necessary to give it a gloss of love of humanity, nobility, gentleness, self-sacrifice - and there is nothing you cannot get them to swallow. To their souls, these are the icing, the tidbit; other kinds of souls have others. --Friedrich Nietzsche
26. Three things have been difficult to tame: the oceans, fools and women. We may soon be able to tame the oceans; fools and women will take a little longer. --Spiro T. Agnew
27. Beauty is a crime.
Even a smile is a crime.
Black rose, just as you have thorns
I will gently swallow it and go.
Try to see the pain in my eyes.
Surely you won't be able to leave me.
I am not loved. There is no one.
I am not loved. There is no one.
--Utsukushisa wa tsumi, writer unknown (tr. by malefics)
28. People's personalities, like buildings, have various facades, some pleasant to view, some not. --La Rochefoucauld
29. As records of courts and justice are admissible, it can easily be proved that powerful and malevolent magicians once existed and were a scourge to mankind. The evidence (including confession) upon which certain women were convicted of witchcraft and executed was without a flaw; it is still unimpeachable. The judges' decisions based on it were sound in logic and in law. Nothing in any existing court was ever more thoroughly proved than the charges of witchcraft and sorcery for which so many suffered death. If there were no witches, human testimony and human reason are alike destitute of value. --Ambrose Bierce
30. Don't think you can attain total awareness and whole enlightenment without proper discipline and practice. This is egomania. Appropriate rituals channel your emotions and life energy toward the light. Without the discipline to practice them, you will tumble constantly backward into darkness. --Lao-Tzu
31. Sex is the one thing you cannot really swindle; and it is the centre of the worst swindling of all, emotional swindling.... Sex lashes out against counterfeit emotion, and is ruthless, devastating against false love. --D. H. Lawrence
32. I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus
With tigery stripes, and a face on it
Round as the moon, to stare up.
I want to be looking at them when they come
Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots.
I see them already-the pale, star-distance faces.
Now they are nothing, they are not even babies.
I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods.
They will wonder if I was important.
--Sylvia Plath, "Last Words"
33. Being always overavid, I demand from those I love a love equal to mine, which, being balanced people, they cannot supply. --Sylvia Ashton-Warner
34. Friendship is like a prism through which the many variations of beauty are revealed in our lives. --Anon.
35. What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. --T.S. Eliot, "Four Quartets"
36. How do you know that you're right if you're not nervous anymore? --The Killers, Bling (Confession of a King)
37. Everything beautiful has its moment and then passes away. --Cernuda y Bidon
38. A standing prick has no conscience. --English proverb
39. When the scary things are scared, it's bad. --Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV show)
40. I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
--John Adams, Letter to Abigail Adams
41. I am in blood stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er. --William Shakespeare, MacBeth
42. I give thanks to the earth
For having waited
For me
At the hour in which the sky and the ocean
come together like two lips
because this is not a small thing, is it? to have lived
through one solitude and to have arrived at another,
to feel that one is many things and to rediscover oneself.
I love all things
and of all the fires
only love never goes out,
for this reason I go from life to life,
from guitar to guitar,
and I am not afraid
of the light or of the shadow,
and because I am made almost of pure earth
I have enough spoons for infinity.
--Pablo Neruda, Aqui vivimos (tr. by Amy)
43. We kill everybody, my dear. Some with bullets, some with words, and everybody with our deeds. We drive people into their graves, and neither see it nor feel it. --Maxim Gorky
44. And who would have thought a cup of coffee
Would make my legs unstable
Shaking under the table
Must be stage fright.
--Blue October, Mr. Blue's Menu
45. "I spent two years on every street in hell." "That's odd. I didn't see you there."
--Philip and Richard, the Lion in Winter
46. Thus we may know that there are five essentials for victory:
(1) He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.
(2) He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces.
(3) He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks.
(4) He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared.
(5) He will win who has military capacity and is not interfered with by the sovereign.
Hence the saying: If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself you will succumb in every battle. --Sun-Tzu, The Art of War [Tr. Lionel Giles]
47. I can't run no more with that lawless crowd
While the killers in high places say their prayers out loud
But they've summoned, they've summoned up a thundercloud
They're going to hear from me.
--Leonard Cohen, Anthem
48. It is a pain in the ass waiting around for someone to try to kill you. --Roger Zelazny, The Trumps of Doom
49. Wizards in trousers? Not in my damn university. It's sissy. People'd laugh. -Terry Pratchett, Soul Magic
50. Love is the emblem of eternity: it confounds all notion of time: effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end. --Germaine De Stael
Love Never Dead Holiday Exchange I: Is just what it sounds like. A fic exchange. For now, you can use this thread to sign up. You can make them private or not, as you choose.
Tell me what pairings you prefer to receive (and remember, at least one Founder must be involved), what rating, subject matter, scenarios or kinks if you have them. Also list what you're comfortable giving in return, whether it be art or fic, which pairings, what ratings, and anything you definitely don't want to receive or to write/draw.
Since this is our first exchange I don't expect it to be very large, but everyone loves receiving gift work! All participants will receive a few stocking stuffers. ;)