Commonplace Book

"All the grand sources of human suffering are in a great degree, many of them almost entirely, conquerable by human care and effort" J.S. Mill

'Bacco, tabacco e Venere riducano il'uomo in cenare' Venetian proverb

'To live is to build a ship and a harbor at the same time and to finish the harbor long after the ship has gone down' Yehuda Amichai

'Emerence was like Jehovah, she punished for generations' The Door Magda Szabo

'Where the heart is concerned, there are no insignificant events - it magnifies all things' The History of the 13 Balzac

'Simple people are capable of sublime devotion' Balzac

'The bitterness she had inside, and brought out in others, turned her ugly' La Mennulara Simonetta Agnello Hornby (what an unlikely name!)

'Everyone must do his own believing as he will have to do his own dying' Martin Luther

'When power and fame are over what remains is family (and the Guardian Crossword of course)' James Callaghan

'Man's nature could be fully realized if only he knew what he really wanted. If a man can discover what there is in the world, and what his relationship is to it, and what he is himself - however he has discovered it, by whichever method, by whichever recommended or traditional path to knowledge, he will know what will fulfill him, what, in other words, will make him just, happy, virtuous, wise.' Isaiah Berlin from Crooked Timber of Humanity

'Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world meaning no harm' Quiet American Graham Greene

'Men find here throughout all their youth a way of living commensurate with their beauty. After that, decay and oblivion. They've staked all on the body - and they know that they must lose' Summer in Algiers Albert Camus

'The education he had received bore little relation to the education he needed' The Education of Henry Adams Henry Adams

'Our own worth is measured by what we devote our energy to' Meditations Marcus Aurelius

'Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction' Blaise Pascal

'Affliction is a good man's shining time' Edward Young

'For time may have yet a better success in reserve for you, and they who lose today may win tomorrow' Cervantes

'Marriage is rather like the nursery rhyme. It starts off with a lot of sucking and blowing and in the end you lose the house' John Mortimer

'Those qualities that make a man odious and unamicable in private life are very successful in public. especially when added to great application and probably both to ambition and every other branch of the selfish and interested passions' Life and Letters of Sir Gilbert Elliot, 1st Earl of Minto

'that he should hold in his esteem his dreams of youth, if he will be a man one day.....That he not stray, e'en if the voice of wisdom speak out from muddy depths its calumny against enthusiasm, heaven's daughter' Schiller

'He has the youth of his enthusiasms' Henry Adams

'She has the faults of her virtues, and her virtues are many' Henry Adams

Amongst the Moorish nomads 'a much darned and patched piece of cloth is often far more expensive to buy than a new piece, because patchwork carries the imprint of human associations' Bruce Chatwin

'He had about him the unassailable tranquility of men who feel at ease with themselves' Seta Alessandro Baricco

'It's looking like it's more fun on the other side' Guest at Frank Sinatra's funeral

'Music that is good for you disturbs, involuntarily, like an erection' Paris Diary Ned Rorem

'Continuous learning is as good for your self-esteem as regular sex' Helena Kennedy

'I don't like political correctness. I don't believe in rigidity' Helena Kennedy

'Americans always take whatever faith or crusade or presentation they go in for to extremes. But then the hurricane passes and is forgotten.' Doris Lessing

'Sentimentality is often the sign of an impure origin. Sentimentality and cruelty are siblings: cruelty often wears a simpering smile' Doris Lessing

My favorite Haiku which I share with you............

Of the infinite steps to my heart
He climbed one
Or perhaps
Two

'His gravedigger's breath distorted her arpeggios' on the effect of the Harp Teacher in Love in the Time of Cholera Gabriel Garcia Marquez

'Stardom is the intersection of personality with history' New Yorker

'Home is where your friends are' Bruce Chatwin

'The present is so strong in New York that the past is lost' Whitney Museum, NYC

'Jackie Kennedy had a whim of iron' a friend

'Our lives are messages by our bodies embottled, afloat in the great sea of the world. We wash up on other folks' shorelines, they on ours. Many go unread, misread, some are read to death and a lucky few meet their ideal readers' Once Upon a Time John Barth

'Every time I can stretch a hand over the divide of politics and class and religion, and touch on something that is mutually understandable, I feel it's a small achievement, a tiny defeat of prejudice' Colin Thubron

'Happy are they who live in the dream of their own existence;.....who watch by faith and hope; to whom the guiding star of their youth still shines from afar, and into whom the spirit of the world has not entered. they have not been 'hurt by the archers' nor has the iron entered their soul. The world has no hand on them' Hazlitt

'I'd always rather do something than be something' Denis Healy

'.......when the human spirit departs it takes with it the vital stuffing of life. Then only the inanimate corpus remains, which is the least of all things that makes us human' How we Die Sherman Nuland

'The French gastronome and playwright Mirande said 'he didn't like making love to society women because they kissed as though they were sipping creme de menthe through a straw' Between Meals in Paris A.J.Liebling

Italy

What the hell is happening in Italy?

How can one of the most beautiful, creative countries in the world with everything going for it - people, food, wine, weather - be screwing everything up so badly that it seems they are bent on self destruction?

How can they be bringing back Berlusconi after the mess he made before; with all his shady connections; with the buffoonery that characterized his last administration in the eyes of the rest of the world. There are already 39 'parties' THIRTY NINE and 'almost eighty crooks in parliament' (see beppegrillo.it) how can that lead to anything stable (it can't) only to an open door for further abuse, corruption and the rape of Italy by unscrupulous politicians, mafiosi, parliamentarians (often interchangeable) and others.

What can be done to stop this happening????