Distance

I am a compulsive quote collector. If I quote you, you should be honored. Unless the person being quoted is dead. I would even quote my dog if I knew what she was saying. She’s a yoda-look alike, so she must be wise. But it’s not just the quote that I like, but the person who said it. I want to know who they are, why they said what they said, and in what context. That last part is the most interesting and sometimes shocking. This is a page in progress. I’ll be adding them as I find them and if I have time, I’ll research into the who what when and where of the quote. Oh and by the way, some of the quotes may in Spanish. I’ll translate. Here is one I just read in a friend’s email:

La distancia ya sea grande o pequeña te hace ver las cosas que cuando estás cerca no puedes ver.

…or in english:

The distance, whether it is big or small, makes you see things that when you’re close you can’t see.

Enjoy!

Money

“Being able to pay the rent is one thing. Building wealth is another.”

They don’t teach that in school. You wonder why? I know what you’re thinking, they really should. But they don’t. End of the story, right? Wrong. You should learn it yourself. It is that important.

All time favorite quote

From On the Road (1957), Chapter 1:

“We went to New York — I forget what the situation was, two colored girls — there were no girls there; they were supposed to meet him in a diner and didn’t show up. We went to his parking lot where he had a few things to do — change his clothes in the shack in back and spruce up a bit in front of a cracked mirror and so on, and then we took off. And that was the night Dean met Carlo Marx. A tremendous thing happened when Dean met Carlo Marx. Two keen minds that they are, they took to each other at the drop of a hat. Two piercing eyes glanced into two piercing eyes — the holy con- man with the shining mind, and the sorrowful poetic con-man with the dark mind that is Carlo Marx. From that moment on I saw very little of Dean, and I was a little sorry too. Their energies met head-on, I was a lout compared, I couldn’t keep up with them. The whole mad swirl of everything that was to come began then; it would mix up all my friends and all I had left of my family in a big dust cloud over the American Night. Carlo told him of Old Bull Lee, Elmer Hassel, Jane: Lee in Texas growing weed, Hassel on Riker’s Island, Jane wandering on Times Square in a benzedrine hallucination, with her baby girl in her arms and ending up in Bellevue. And Dean told Carlo of unknown people in the West like Tommy Snark, the clubfooted poolhall rotation shark and cardplayer and queer saint. He told him of Roy Johnson, Big Ed Dunkel, his boyhood buddies, his street buddies, his innumerable girls and sex-parties and pornographic pictures, his heroes, heroines, adventures. They rushed down the street together, digging everything in the early way they had, which later became so much sadder and perceptive and blank. But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!” What did they call such young people in Goethe’s Germany? Wanting dearly to learn how to write like Carlo, the first thing you know, Dean was attacking him with a great amorous soul such as only a con-man can have. “Now, Carlo, let me speak — here’s what I’m saying…” I didn’t see them for about two weeks, during which time they cemented their relationship to fiendish allday- allnight-talk proportions. “

By Jack Kerouac (1922 – 1969)