Comes the Dawn

After a while you learn the subtle difference
Between holding a hand and chaining a soul,
And you begin to learn that kisses aren't contracts
And presents aren't promises
And you begin to accept your defeats
With your head up and your eyes open,
With the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child,
And you learn to build all your roads
On today because tomorrow's ground
Is too uncertain.  And futures have
A way of falling down in midflight
After a while you learn that even sunshine burns if you get too much.
So you plant your own garden and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting
For someone to bring you flowers.
And you learn that you really can endure...
That you really are strong.
And you really do have worth
And you learn and learn
With every goodbye you learn.

     -- Veronica A. Shoffstall

I'd lie to you for your love
And that's the truth

   -- A song by the Bellamy Brothers, played often in the OPB.

Denniston's law:
    Virtue is its own punishment.

   -- from George Sherman via Tim Rooney.

Early on, Queenie saw that girls who used honey to get what they wanted got only what men would have given them anyway.

   -- Susan Isaacs, Red, White and Blue

   -- Header, Time Magazine, 4/2000

   -- from a country song played in the OPB

   -- Unknown source, via Art Taber.

   -- Virgina Woolf.

   -- RuthAnn, Northern Exposure,
      refusing a marriage proposal from Gilly the travelling salesman

... a doctrinal response, either from one of the elders in the group or from one of the debutantes eager to ingratiate herself among those who held that the highest expression of married woman was reasonable submission to man's will.  Marriage is the end of woman, one of them would say.  And Ada would respond, Indeed.

   -- Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

"Lie as much as you please," Don Quixote suggested, "but take heed of what you say."

   -- Miguel de Cervantes, The Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha

Fellow inmate to Morgan Freeman, finding out that Morgan's petition for parole had been denied: "I know how you feel.  I'm up for rejection next week."

   -- The Shawshank Redemption

"My guess is that the Y chromosome of every living man has spent at least one generation in the testis of a warlord . "

   -- Dr. Bryan Sykes, Oxford geneticist and science adviser to the British House of Commons
         NYT interview, 6/8/2004

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.  It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active.  The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.

   --John Philpot Curran: Speech upon the Right of Election, 1790. (Speeches. Dublin, 1808.)

There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies as against despots.  What is it?  Distrust.

   --Demosthenes: Philippic 2, sect. 24.

   --M.C. Beaton, Agatha Raisin and the Wizard of Evesham

Being single can be confusing.  On the one hand, you sometimes yearn for the simple comfort of companionship; someone to discuss your day with, someone with whom you can celebrate a raise or tax refund, someone who'll commiserate when you're down with a cold.  On the other hand, once you get used to being alone (in other words, having everything your way), you have to wonder why you'd ever take on the aggravation of a relationship.

      -- Sue Grafton, "M" Is for Malice

"You know, son, the carnal seems to be another hangup with women.  I got a theory.  Men and women are different, and I don't just mean in the obvious way.  I'm talking sex drive.  I figure from the time a fellow knows it's possible, he's raring to go.  But the little lady's sex drive peaks later.  Probably posthumously."

   -- Joanne Pence, Cooking Most Deadly.

Oh where are the simple joys of maidenhood?

   -- Joshua Logan's Camelot, 1967.

A woman had not touched a hand to him with any degree of tenderness in so long that he had come to see himself as another kind of creature altogether from what he had been.  It was his lot to bear the penalty of the unredeemed, that tenderness be forevermore denied him and that his life be marked down a dark mistake.

   -- Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

The silence in my office was linear and dwindling, like an art-perspective exercise.  The building was pretty much empty for the night and the occasional faraway drone and jolt of the elevator only added energy to the silence.

I sipped a little whiskey.

When you thought about it, silence was rarely silent.  Silence was the small noises you heard when the larger noises disappeared.

   -- Robert B. Parker, The Widening Gyre

Dear Abby,
I suspected that my husband had been fooling around, and when I confronted him with the evidence he denied everything and said it would never happen again.

   -- from Dear Abby, contributed by Jeri Walsh.

My first attempts to prune made the vines look as though they had passed through a shredder.  The canes hung limp and lacked strong structure and definition; they seemed out of balance, as if the branches I had chosen to save did not belong. ... Occasionally I neglected to leave spurs, cleanly snipping off old growth before remembering I should have left a foundation for the future.

   -- Mas Masumoto, Harvest Son.

The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,
Moves on; nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

   -- Omar Khayyam, Rubáiyát, Stanza lxxi.

I value the physical sensation of sexual intercourse about as highly as I value a piece of plum cake.

   -- George Bernard Shaw, letter to Laura Ormiston Chant, a social reformer and campaigner against prostitution, 17 November 1894

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