Quotations from the original green folderClick image for home page

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go, I travel for travels sake. The great affair is to move, to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly, to come down off the feather bed of civilisation and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.

RL STEVENSON

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Life is mostly froth and bubble
Two things stand out as stone
Kindness in another's trouble
Courage in your own.

AL GORDON

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A definition of Vandalism for today.

Any action
That destroys some useful or beautiful thing
Without making money out of it.

uncredited.

from 'AFTER THE RAIN" by JOHN BOWEN

ALAN
What's the point?
LECTURER
Of what?
ALAN
Human life. Everything. Look.
You're born; you grow old; you die. You feed and sleep, and go to work every week, and take a holiday once a year. You raise children, and they grow up and leave you, and you're left alone. Much of your life is spent in discomfort, and more in boredom, and most in indifference. All you have to expect is monotony and struggle while you're working, and loneliness and fear in your old age. And what's it all for? You don't really believe that making things, and packing them up, and moving them about, and selling them, and buying them, and consuming them, and making new things to replace them all, add up to a reason for living. But you go on - keeping alive, because you're afraid of death. If Arthur knows what he wants, and why he wants it, what can I do?

from the BIBA calendar - 1972?

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'Tis pleasant through the loopholes of retreat
To peep at such a world; to see the stir
Of the great Babel, and not feel the crowd"                      WILLIAM COWPER
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'A stillness grows, an elegance of watery space.'             BRIAN JONES
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'The people along the sand
All turn and look one way
They turn their back on land
They look at the sea all day'                                    ROBERT FROST
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'I heard dancing there, music in the air,
Feet going quick on the green floor'                                    TOLKIEN
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'For I know hide-and-seek's most secret places
More than your sisters do. And you and I
Can scramble in to them and leave no traces,
Nothing above us but the twigs and sky'                        JOHN BETJEMAN
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'country girl
I will bring you nightflowers
coloured like your eyes'                                                 ADRIAN HENRI
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'court ladies flow in gentle streams.
Or, gathering lotus, strain sideways from their curving boat'             WJ ENRIGHT
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'... when the late afternoon
drifts into the woods, when
nothing matters specially.'                                                 BRIAN PATTEN
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'nothing to do
but stare at the world of gold
And hark to the hum that would distantly come
as gaily round it rolled.'                                                             TOLKIEN
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'but cannot fathom out
whose dawn she belongs in,
so among them is silent.'                                                 BRIAN PATTEN
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'She's shy - of the violet persuasion, but
that's not a bad thing in a young girl.'                                     RONALD FIRBANK

from WAITING FOR GODOT by SAMUEL BECKETT

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VLADIMIR: What do they say?
ESTRAGON: They talk about their lives.
VLADIMIR: To have lived is not enough for them.
ESTRAGON: They have to talk about it.
VLADIMIR: To be dead is not enough for them.
ESTRAGON: It is not sufficient.

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(Estragon is leaving his boots at the edge of the stage)
VLADIMIR: But you can't go barefoot.
ESTRAGON: Christ did.

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VLADIMIR: We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?

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VLADIMIR: One of the thieves was saved. (Pause) It's a reasonable percentage.

VLADIMIR: and yet...how is it that of the four Evangelists only one speaks of a thief being saved. The four of them were there - or thereabouts - and only one speaks of a thief being saved.

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BECKETT

Do not despair - one thief was saved. Do not presume - one thief was damned.

'Walk into the Dark' critique by Chris Dinkley

...if John Hopkins intended to show that, unlike Donne, he believes every man is an island and that these myriad islands have no identity except when expressed in their positions relative to other land masses, then he succeeded ... People frequently lie in 'Walk into the Dark' and when they do tell the truth they usually do create even greater difficulty and more pain; but then they have been doing that since Adam and Eve.

In their indefatigable efforts to hurt one another, men use a million words to every bullet.