User:Sputnikcccp/Favourites

My Favourites
Here are some of my favourite things: (this is your last chance to stop reading before you get to find out what I'm really like!)

Favourite Poems:

 * Hollow Men, by T.S. Elliot
 * The Mouse's Petition, by Anna Barbauld
 * anyone lived in a pretty how town, by E. E. Cummings
 * Vestigia, by Bliss Carmen
 * The Lady of Shallott, by Alfred Lord Tennyson
 * Lament for the Dorsets, by Al Purdy
 * i thank You God for most this amazing day, by E. E. Cummings
 * Ars Poetica, by Archibald Macleish
 * Sonnet XLIII, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
 * The Definition of Love, by Andrew Marvell
 * Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, by Wallace Stevens
 * And Death Shall Have no Dominion, by Dylan Thomas
 * House of Changes, by Jeni Couzyn
 * Love is not All, by Edna St. Vincent Millay
 * Poet, Lover Birdwatcher, by Nissim Ezekiel
 * Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelly
 * I have not lingered in European monasteries, by Leonard Cohen
 * Ulysses, by Alfred Lord Tennyson
 * Cain, by W. H. Auden
 * Liberte, by Paul Eluard
 * Pour faire le portrait d'un oiseau, by Jacques Prévert
 * To the Oracle at Delphi, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
 * A Noiseless Patient Spider, by Walt Whitman
 * Mother to Son, by Langston Hughes
 * Marking, by Tom Wayman
 * Warning, by Jenny Joseph
 * Anything written by Yehuda Amichai, especially A Night Drive to Ein Yahav and Appendix to the Vision of Peace.

Favourite Quotes:

 * The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men - Leonardo da Vinci
 * The only way to atone for being occasionally a little over-dressed is by being always absolutely over-educated. - Oscar Wilde
 * I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.' - Aldous Huxley
 * We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. - Robert Ardrey
 * Impossible is a word found only in the dictionaries of fools! - Napoleon Bonaparte
 * Perhaps parents would enjoy their children more if they stopped to realize that the film of childhood can never be run through for a second showing. - Evelyn Nown
 * Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them. - The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
 * Mathematics is the alphabet in which God wrote the universe. - Galileo Galilei
 * We all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure for all diseases. - Sir Thomas Browne
 * This is a sharp medicine, but it is a sure cure for all diseases. - Sir Walter Raleigh, upon examining his executioner's axe.
 * If you always assume the man sitting next to you is the Messiah waiting for some simple human kindness - you will soon come to weigh your words and watch your hands. And if he so chooses not to reveal himself in your time - it will not matter. - Danny Siegal
 * When you have eliminated the impossible, that which remains, however improbable, must be the truth. - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
 * The danger lies not in knowledge, but in the abuse of knowledge. - St. John
 * We will have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us. - Golda Meir
 * Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. - Mark Twain
 * We hope that there will be fireflies and glow-worms at night to guide you and butterflies in hedges and forests to greet you. We hope that your dawns will have an orchestra of bird song and that the sound of their wings and the opalescence of their colouring will dazzle you. We hope that there will still be the extraordinary varieties of creatures sharing the land of the planet with you to enchant you and enrich your lives as they have done for us. We hope that you will be grateful for having been born into such a magical world. - Gerald Durrell
 * Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing. - Wernher von Braun
 * Those who cannot remember the past are condemmed to repeat it. - George Santayana
 * Physicians can bury their mistakes, all an architect can do is tell his client to plant some vines. - Frank Lloyd Wright
 * Time is nature's way of stopping everything from happening at once. - John Wheeler
 * I believe that the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. That is clear. Whether one believes in religion or not, whether one believes in this religion or that religion, we all are seeking something better in life. So, I think the very motion of our life is towards happiness. - His Holiness the XIVth Dalai Lama - I heard this in person from His Holiness when he came to Toronto in 2002
 * It often happens that I wake up at night and begin to think about a serious problem and decide I must tell the Pope about it. Then I wake up completely and remember that I am the Pope. - Pope John XXIII
 * It is not good to dwell on dreams, and forget to live. - Albus Dumbledore
 * We all come back, Kate. These private little revolutions always die. The compromise is always made. In a peculiar way, Frank is right - Every man does have a star. The star of one's honesty. And you spend your life groping for it, but once it's gone out it never lights again. I don't think he went very far. He probably just wanted to be alone to watch his star go out... I live in the usual darkness; I can't find myself; it's even hard to remember the kind of man I wanted to be. - All My Sons, Arthur Miller
 * My father says it's your duty to explore all your talents. There are so many untalented people in this world that if you have any aptitude you should use it, otherwise it's criminal, you know, like being in a country of the blind and not using your eyes. - Gerald Durrell, The Mockery Bird
 * Human beings are born free, but are everywhere in chains. - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Favourite Shakespeare Quotations:

 * I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; A stage where every man must play a part, And mine a sad one. - Merchant of Venice
 * This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow as the night the day Thou canst not be false to any man. - Hamlet
 * Though this be madness, yet there is method in't! - Hamlet
 * We are such stuff As dreams are made of... - The Tempest
 * But hear thee, Gratiano; Thou art too wild, too rude and bold of voice; Parts that become thee happily enough And in such eyes as ours appear not faults; But where thou art not known, why, there they show Something too liberal. Pray thee, take pain To allay with some cold drops of modesty Thy skipping spirit, lest through thy wild behavior I be misconstrued in the place I go to, And lose my hopes. - Merchant of Venice
 * Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. - Twelfth Night
 * There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. - Hamlet
 * Lord, what fools these mortals be! - A Midsummer Night's Dream
 * Who can control his fate? - Othello
 * Why, then the world 's mine oyster! - The Merry Wives of Windsor
 * Brevity is the soul of wit. - Hamlet
 * Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow - Romeo and Juliet
 * What's done cannot be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed! - Macbeth
 * That that is is - Twelfth Night

Favourite Shakespeare Soliloquies:

 * I am a Jew. Hath a Jew not eyes?...- The Merchant of Venice
 * O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth... - Julius Caesar
 * If music be the food of love, play on... - Twelfth Night
 * Out, out, brief candle! - Macbeth
 * The quality of mercy is not strained... - The Merchant of Venice
 * I am as constant as the North Star... - Julius Caesar
 * I have of late - but wherefore I know not - lost all my mirth... - Hamlet
 * This was the noblest Roman of them all... - Julius Caesar
 * To be or not to be... - Hamlet (I had to memorize the whole soliloquy for English)

Favourite Musicians:

 * Enya
 * Sarah McLachlan
 * Amanda Marshall
 * Simon and Garfunkel
 * Leonard Cohen
 * Joni Mitchell
 * Matti Caspi
 * Ofra Haza
 * Peter, Paul and Mary
 * Idan Raichel

Favourite Books:

 * The Mockery Bird, by Gerald Durrell
 * The Professor and The Madman, by Simon Winchester
 * The whole Discworld series, by Terry Pratchett.
 * All National Geographics, especially old ones.
 * Animal Farm, by George Orwell
 * Silas Marner, by George Eliot
 * King Solomon's Mines, and Allan Quatermain, by H. Rider Haggard.
 * The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I've read the original French, and the English and Hebrew translations. All very good.
 * The Mma Ramotswe series, by Alexander McCall Smith.
 * The Art of Looking Sideways, by Alan Fletcher.
 * East of Eden, by John Steinbeck
 * The Andromeda Strain, The Great Train Robbery, Eaters of the Dead, Congo, Sphere, Prey, and the Jurassic Park series, all by Michael Crighton.
 * 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, and Around the World in 80 Days, all by Jules Verne.

Favourite Movies:

 * The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
 * Pirates of the Caribbean
 * The Truman Show
 * Pleasantville
 * Monsters Inc
 * The Emperor's New Groove