Some stuff from my bulletin board

Hello,

Somewhere along the line I started collecting sayings, poems and anything written that struck a chord with me. When Lori recently refurbished my music room, she suggested that I no longer lived in a dorm and that I take down the two bulletin boards that I had on the wall filled with these artifacts of my life from when I left home up to the present. When I took them down, I came across stuff I hadn't read in years, decades really. Some of it wasn't even legible any more, but I thought I'd post the rest here as a way to preserve those memories. They appear below, and while some might seem nonsensical, every one of them has some meaning and comes from a particular point in my adult life. (This is starting to sound self-indulgent, so I'm just going to get started.)

"Fortune sides with him who dares." - Virgil

"Death finds us amid our playthings, snatches us as a cross nurse might do a wayward child from all our toys and baubles." - An Old Play

"As long as you are honest and kind, you don't have to be timid about doing what you want to do." - Miss Manners' Mom

"All that I know I learned after I was 30." - George Clemenceau

"To find out a girl's faults, praise her to her girlfriends." - B. Franklin

"If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business because we'd be cynical. Well', that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down." - R. Bradbury

"Not a day passes over the earth, but men and women of no note do great deeds, speak great words and suffer noble sorrows." C. Reade

"In art, nothing worth doing can be done without genius; in science, even a moderate capacity can contribute to a supreme achievement." B. Russell.

"In all good music, there is that element of tension and release - whether it's done with dynamics or harmony or even theatrics. And you don't get it by playing it safe all the time." Steve Khan

"Don't look down." David Bowie

"So try it and see." Herman Wouk

"Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth." Alan Watts

"To understand all is to forgive all". (Not sure)

"A funny thing about life - if you refuse to accept anything but the very best, you very often get it." W. Somerset Maugham

"Happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length." Robert Frost

"How I long for a little ordinary human enthusiasm. Just enthusiasm - that's all. I want to hear a warm, thrilling voice crying out 'Hallelujah! Hallelujah! I'm alive!" John Osborne

"Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity." William Hazlitt

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that h emust take himself, for better or worse." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The only real failure in life is failing to try." Verna Noel Jones

"Uncertainty and mystery are energies in life. Don't let them scare you unduly, for they keep boredom at bay and spark creativity." R.I. Fitzhenry

"In the midst of great joy, do not promise anyone anything. In the midst of great anger, do not answer anyone's letter." Chinese proverb

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference." Robert Frost

One mo to go
Two do da sho
Three fo yo + me
Four da yak I see

Greg Baier

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

John Gillespie Magee, Jr.