Wordgrove Post & Review

Quoted in The Grove:

Atlas isn’t carrying the world on his shoulders, no giant muscular hulk with a sense of responsibility; the world is balanced on a pyramid of clowns, and they are always tooting horns and wobbling and goosing each other.
~Dean Koontz

Making eye contact with adults while dressed as a clown is risky.
~Douglas Coupland

It seems so absurd to get really mad with a cartoonist over a comic strip. It’s sort of like getting in a fight with a circus clown outside your house. It’s not going to end well.
~Stephan Pastis

EndQuote:
We are in the same tent as the clowns and the freaks – that’s show business.
~Edward R Murrow

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Exercise Prompt for 01/17:  shirt

~ ~

Being a funny person does an awful lot of things to you. You feel that you mustn’t get serious with people. They don’t expect it from you, and they don’t want to see it. You’re not entitled to be serious, you’re a clown.
~Fanny Brice

Only comedians can talk about death, life, God and Virgin Mary. If I was a tragic actor, I couldn’t allow myself. But with this accent I can do it. I can talk with death in person because I am a clown. Yes. And I am proud to be a clown – very much.
~Roberto Benigni

Laughter is a celebration of our failings. That’s what clowns are for. And that’s what I am.
~Emma Thompson

I am a clown…and I collect moments.
~Heinrich Böll

~

No one knows Anne’s better side, and that’s why most people can’t stand me. Oh, I can be an amusing clown for an afternoon, but after that, everyone’s had enough of me to last a month.
~Anne Frank

I’ve said this before, that, when you’re in school and you’re the class clown, men are really good at making fun at other people and women are really good at making fun of themselves.
~Amy Poehler

~ ~

Posted from the Grove

I’m one of the more pessimistic cats on the planet. I make Van Gogh look like a rodeo clown.
~Dennis Miller

If people are a little nervous about approaching you at the market, it’s good. I’m not Chuckles The Clown. Or Bozo. I don’t cut the ribbon at the opening of markets. I don’t stand next to the mayor. Hit your baseball into my yard, and you’ll never see it again.
~Tom Waits

People like eccentrics. Therefore they will leave me alone, saying that I am a mad clown.
~Vaslav Nijinsky

~

As a clown, you’re letting go of all of your bullshit.
~Caitlin Rose

I’m obsessed with clowns and what they represent and the idea that clowns are supposed to make you laugh, but inevitably they’re hiding something. That’s how I look at my life.
~Madonna Ciccone

~~

~Go Project Films:  Laugh Clown Laugh   (7:43)   a day in the life
https://vimeo.com/60202790

~

~Vincent Urban: In Russia   (6:37)   forget the politics: real people live here, in real beauty
https://vimeo.com/channels/staffpicks/480867318

~~

I know what I look like – a weird, sad clown puppet. I’m fine with that.
~Rainn Wilson

I suppose that I’m fairly comfortable with the clown hat on.
~Nick Rhodes

I am a clown, just without the painted smile.
~Chevy Chase

~

A wise man can play the part of a clown, but a clown can’t play the part of a wise man.
~Malcolm X

I remember in the circus learning that the clown was the prince, the high prince. I always thought that the high prince was the lion or the magician, but the clown is the most important.
~Roberto Benigni

The cleverest character in comedy is the clown, for he who would make people take him for a fool, must not be one.
~Miguel de Cervantes

Who are a little wise the best fools be.
~Dr John Donne

The wisest people are the clowns, like Harpo Marx, who would not speak. If I could have anything I want I would like God to listen to what Harpo was not saying, and understand why Harpo would not talk.
~Philip K Dick

The art of the clown is more profound than we think. It is the comic mirror of tragedy, and the tragic mirror of comedy.
~Andre Suares

There is no better role to play among the great than that of jester.
~Denis Diderot

~~

VIDEO:

God’s children and their happiness are my reasons for being.
~Red Skelton

I am prouder of my title ‘The Children’s Friend’ than if I were to be called ‘The King of the World’.
~P T Barnum

A Clown is an angel with a red nose.
~J T “Bubba” Sykes

Be. Here. NOW. Don’t forget to breathe. When all else fails, grab a clown nose.
~Tom Bergeron

~

Wearing underwear on the outside of your clothes can turn a tedious trip to the store for a forgotten carton of milk into an amusement park romp.
~Patch Adams

You’ve got to realize that when all goes well, and everything is beautiful, you have no comedy. It’s when somebody steps on the bride’s train, or belches during the ceremony that you’ve got comedy!”
~Phyllis Diller

I’ve seen what a laugh can do. It can transform almost unbearable tears into something bearable, even hopeful.”
~Bob Hope

~~

~Omeleto:  Today’s the Day   (14:08)   a musical short
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=today%27s+the+day

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~Omeleto:  Step Right Up   (9:16)   warm, unfunny love
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qr3mrTt3vw

~

~Omeleto:  Clown Face   (10:26)   bad dad, daughter and a mirror
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQKhjNotAfY

~

~Roshan Murthy:  Clown   (8:44)   the very sad, sad clown
https://vimeo.com/5832044

~~

I’m divorced and I’ve been to the circus and seen the clowns. This ain’t my first rodeo.
~Naomi Judd

Love is a pig dressed as a clown sitting in a bath full of beans: pretty much amazing, once you get over the shock.
~Craig Stone

Love may make the world go around, but laughter keeps us from getting dizzy.
~Donald Zockert

Is that love? It seems like a pale word, too easily tossed about by people who don’t know the meaning of it, who twist it for their own ends. I’m afraid of it now, right up there with clowns, close spaces, and open flames.
~Ann Aguirre

Clowning is a trick to get love close. I can hug 99 percent of people in the first second of contact if I’m in my clown character. The clown assumes your humanity. It assumes that, whatever trauma you’ve had, you can still love yourself.
~Patch Adams

Humor is something that strives between a person’s aspirations and his limitations. There is more logic in humor than in anything else. Because, you see, humor is truth.
~Victor Borge

True humor springs more from the heart than from the head; it is not contempt, its essence is love.
~Thomas Carlyle

~~

MUSIC:

I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad.
~William Shakespeare

It is meat and drink to me to see a clown.
~William Shakespeare

A smile is the light
on the window of your face
that tells others
that your heart is at home.
~Philip D Noble

Anyone who can make people laugh has the greatest gift God can give a man.
~Al Ross

The person who can bring the spirit of laughter into a room is indeed blessed.
~Bennett Cerf

Humor – The sunshine of the mind.
~Bulwer-Lytton Good

Good humor is goodness and wisdom combined.
~Owen Meredith

~

The human race has only one really effective weapon, and that’s laughter. The moment it arises, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and resentments slip away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.
~Mark Twain

Make a man laugh a good hearty laugh, and you have paved the way for friendship. When a man laughs with you, he to some extent likes you.
~Dale Carnegie

Humor is the foundation of reconciliation.
~St Francis de Sales

Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.
~Victor Borge

~~

Judy Collins: Send in the Clowns

~Dame Judi Dench   (4:50)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvZex3Qf7QQ

-or-

~Glenn Close:   (4:12)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vufO2FZY6XQ

~

~Cole Porter ( from movie: The Pirate)  Be A Clown   (3:53)   classic comedy pizzaz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-MrAo8-1jw

~

~Roy Orbison:  Candy Colored Clown, feat. The Frolic King   (2:48)   lip sync
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4g_tRJ0Hb5I

~

~Everly Brothers:  Cathy’s Clown, feat. Reba McEntire   (3:07)   western soap
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYVKQW-RORs

~

~Bobby Goldsboro:  Funny Little Clown   (3:23)   international heart
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8tzHS9n3f4

~~

A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to the general applause of wits who believe it’s a joke.
~Soren Kierkegaard

When the whole world turns clown, and paints itself red with its own hearts blood instead of vermilion, it is something else than comic.
~John Ruskin

These Macedonians,” said he, “are a rude and clownish people, that call a spade a spade.
~Plutarch.

Jesters do often prove prophets.
~William Shakespeare

~

I’m not sure how a world leader reacts to the work of a clown.
~Darrell Hammond

Men without dignity are like clowns without an audience, pathetic and lost.
~Rubin Carter

I remain just one thing, and one thing only — and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician.
~Charlie Chaplin

A clown can get away with murder.
~John Wayne Gacy

A circus! 100 clowns of injustice have climbed out of the tiny clown car of this court room.
~Ellen DeGeneres

Sometimes evil is in the form of a malignant clown, and sometimes evil is in the form of policy and legislators, and sometimes it’s a grinning death mask and it has something more viscerally terrifying about it.
~Karyn Kusama

A God who is trying to convince people that He is a God is not a God! He is just a clown disguised as a God! No supreme power can be in need of convincing men!
~Mehmet Murat Ildan

If there had been a charismatic figure in the United States who could mobilize fears, anger, racism, a sense of loss of the future that belongs to us, this country could be in real danger. We’re lucky that there never has been an honest, charismatic figure. McCarthy was too much of a thug, you know? Nixon was too crooked. Trump, I think, is too much of a clown. So, we’ve been lucky.
~Noam Chomsky

The highest of renown
Are the surest stricken down;
But the stupid and the clown
They remain.
~Eugene Fitch Ware

Clowns and elephants are the pegs on which the circus is hung.
~P T Barnum

~~

~~

Across the street, a clown picked up a ladder, turned, knocked the clown behind him into a bucket of water, then turned again to see what the commotion was, thus sending his rising victim into the bucket again with a surprising parping noise. The crowd watched silently. If it were funny, clowns wouldn’t be doing it.
~Terry Pratchett,

No clowns were funny. That was the whole purpose of a clown. People laughed at clowns, but only out of nervousness. The point of clowns was that, after watching them, anything else that happened seemed enjoyable.
~Terry Pratchett

~

Life is a series of ups and clowns. Make it worth your wild!
~Richard Branson

I had a friend who was a clown. When he died, all his friends went to the funeral in one car.
~Steven Wright

When fighting clowns, always go for the juggler.
~Rawi Hage

Is it true that cannibals don’t eat clowns because they taste funny?
~Steven Wright

When all the people covered in tattoos turn about 70 years old, they’re going to look like a strange race of melting clowns.
~Dana Gould

There’s nothing like a clown with a boner to remind you that you’re having a nightmare.
~Dana Gould

When I see professional clowns, mimes, or people who makes balloon animals, I think of their relatives and how disappointed they must be.
~Jimmy Fallon

~~

~~

Everyone knows there’s only one thing less welcome on a stage than a mime, and that’s a clown, because everyone knows that clowns eat people.
~Laurie Notaro

I hate clowns. You can’t see what they’re thinking.
~Geraldine McCaughrean

Clowns are always creepy!
~Kate Bush

The child’s laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.
~Angela Carter

You have to be kind of alerted to the fact that clowns are scary and then you can’t look at them the same way again. There’s something very sinister about them… There’s something very tragic about them as well. The last thing they are is funny.
~Reece Shearsmith

I don’t even like clowns. Clowns are not normal people.
~Barbara Park

Death’s gruesome face taunts: soulless eyes, crimson grimace. I really hate clowns.
~Katherine Applegate

“Everyone hates clowns,” Otis said. “Even other clowns hate clowns.
~Rick Riordan

Clowns are vicious – they’re all nefarious grins – and if you hung out with a bunch of clowns in a bar, pretty soon it would turn into a horror movie. Nefarious means evil. It’s nothing to do with Rastas.
~Jenni Fagan

Nobody likes a clown at midnight
~Stephen King

I hate clowns. I’ve mentioned that, right?
~D J MacHale

~

If you look at photographs of clowns when they’re just being ordinary men, they’ve got quite sad faces.
~Enid Blyton

Clowns drink to blot out the ravages of terrifying children for a living.
~Douglas Coupland

You turn into this desperate dude looking for a shred of attention when you just had so much. It’s like, “I’m just lonely and all I really want is a hug, but I gotta capture that in something real gross.” You start to understand why circus clowns are alcoholics.
~Babatunde Adebimpe

You never have a comedian who hasn’t got a very deep strain of sadness within him or her. Every great clown has been very near to tragedy.
~Margaret Rutherford

We are the zanies of sorrow. We are clowns whose hearts are broken.
~Oscar Wilde

The artist, like the idiot or clown, sits on the edge of the world, and a push may send him over it.
~Osbert Sitwell

So even in hell, there are clowns.
~Vernor Vinge

~

Heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he’s depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says, “Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up.” Man bursts into tears. Says, “But doctor…I am Pagliacci.
~Alan Moore”

I mean, a clown’s got it all. He never has to hold back: He can do as he pleases. The mouth and the eyes are painted on. So if you wanta cry, you can go right ahead. The makeup won’t smear. You’ll still be smiling. . .
~Red Skelton

~ ~

@Writers Platform

Writing is for men who can think and feel, not mindless sensation seekers out of nightclubs and bars. But these are bad times. We are condemned to work with upstarts, clowns who no doubt got their training in a circus and then turned to journalism as the appropriate place to display their tricks.
~Naguib Mahfouz

Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.
~John Steinbeck

Vulgarity is a necessary part of a complete author’s equipment; and the clown is sometimes the best part of the circus.
~George Bernard Shaw

The writer’s job is the job of a clown …the clown who also talks about sorrow.
~Kenzaburo Oe

Truth be told, when you start your career out as a clown, you don’t consider yourself a writer.
~Lizz Winstead

In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as priest, and ends as a clown or buffoon.
~Malcolm Muggeridge

I should think that many of our poets, the honest ones, will confess to having no manifesto. It is a painful confession but the art of poetry carries its own powers without having to break them down into critical listings. I do not mean that poetry should be raffish and irresponsible clown tossing off words into the void. But the very feeling of a good poem carries its own reason for being… Art is its own excuse, and it’s either Art or it’s something else. It’s either a poem or a piece of cheese.
~Charles Bukowski

When you write, you can hide behind your words. When you talk, you are up front, like the clown in the midway booth; and passersby can bean you with a ball.
~Willard R Espy

READ! Books can be as delicious as hot-fudge sundaes, as funny as clowns, as exciting as a baseball game that’s tied in the 9th inning, and as beautiful as the best sunset you ever saw.
~Judith Viorst

~

Uncertain whose the narrowest span,- the clown unread, or half-read gentleman.
~John Dryden

Better a witty fool then a foolish wit.
~William Shakespeare

Never underestimate a clown with a book.
~Rawi Hage

~~

Glass Table:  Contest Entry

~susanszy:  The Ice Mermaid

It was a dark and stormy night. Really.

The pirates aboard the Royal Fortune were making their way through the raging seas after having looted and pillaged Port Arthur.

The captain, Black Bart, had had too much rum but insisted on manning the helm. It was a bad, bad idea thought Billy Bones, the deaf first mate. But nothing could dissuade the captain. Yes, Billy Bones was indeed deaf, but he could read lips very well. No one on board even suspected he couldn’t hear.

Meanwhile, a golden mermaid had spotted the ship and was following its struggle in the gale and terrifying waves. Perfect. She glided gleefully to a nearby dark island.

The mermaid carefully chose a spot atop a craggy hill, where sharp rocks were exposed below. She cast her gaze upon the ship in the storm, and began her eerie song. Her voice carried through the strong winds and torrential rain where it assailed the captain’s ears.

Black Bart was immediately mesmerized by the siren song. The rest of the crew went below deck and fell asleep, as if they were enchanted. And indeed they were. Black Bart, drawn by a strong dark magic, turned the Royal Fortune toward the sound – and right for the dangerous rocks.

Billy Bones was not affected by the siren song. He was horrified to see that the captain was heading right for the sharp rocks which were clearly seen during each lightning flash. What was wrong with the captain? Billy Bones tried arguing with the captain, but to no avail – so he tried brute force. The captain, who seemed to have the strength of ten men, tried to throw Billy Bones overboard. But Billy had a death grip on the captain, so overboard they BOTH went.

The mermaid saw Billy Bones and Captain Black Bart enter the water. She then raised her arms. At that gesture, the swirling water turned to icy crags. Billy Bones and Black Bart froze immediately, and the Royal Fortune crashed into the sharp icy floes. The ship foundered, then sank beneath the ice.

The mermaid, also known as the Ice Mermaid, ceased her siren song. The ice in the sea melted. The golden Ice Mermaid swam away, watching for the next ship, which was sure to come soon. She was ready.

~~

The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.
~e e cummings

To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain and play with it!
~Charlie Chaplin

If we couldn’t laugh, we would all go insane.
~Jimmy Buffet

Man could direct his ways by plain reason, and support his life by tasteless food, but God has given us wit, and flavor, and brightness, and laughter to enliven the days of man’s pilgrimage, and to charm his pained steps over the burning marble.
~Sydney Smith

Laugh and the world laughs with you, weep and you weep alone.
~Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Humor is like food. You have to have it every day.”
~Sid Caesar

We don’t stop laughing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop laughing.
~George Bernard Shaw

~~

Exercise Prompt:   clown

~~

A good laugh heals a lot of hurts.
~Madeleine L’Engle

A clown is like aspirin, only he works twice as fast
~Groucho Marx

Grim care, moroseness, anxiety — all this rust of life ought to be scoured off by the oil of mirth. Mirth is God’s medicine.
~Henry Ward Beecher

The role of a clown and a physician are the same it’s to elevate the possible and to relieve suffering.
~Patch Adams

The arrival of a good clown exercises a more beneficial influence upon the health of a town than twenty asses laden with drugs.
~Thomas Sydenham

~~

The Exercise:

~BarTalk:

the circus

less than tragic more than sad
oxymoron, clown in love
recently registered irregular heartbeat
decently decorated threadbare coat sleeve
fickle volatile smiles upside down
puppet love would-be, misbehaving frown

~

Epiphany

Visited epiphany
This day of infamy
Tricked out clown
Full-blown insanity
Seditions, seductions
Treasonous atrocities
Grab ’em by the putsch
See, watch it wriggle free
Curséd day called Epiphany

~

course revision

callow students
hallowed teachers
sacred clowns
from holy fools
rethink the future
nature of schools
two steps up
from the iron rule
do unto others
before they do unto you
a golden thought
for the art of living
’stead of push and pull
gifted hearts
full of giving

~

5-7-5 x 4

death no longer news
passing strange this passage, time
god Clown flips a coin

~

3 lines 3 times

clown, vain little man
supposed himself greater than
the clubhouse he ran
~
clown in the mirror
irrelevant, petulant
unrequited vote
~
ham it up, loser
politics, clowning around
ain’t funny no more

~ ~

I don’t know what happiness is. I don’t know what sweet caress is. Still, I’m always laughing like a clown.
~Bob Marley

I was just school class clown and that was it. Someday I’ll get a job as a cab driver or whatever.
~John Leguizamo

Sure, I could of done it different… put my clown in a closet and dressed up in straight clothing. I could of compromised my essence, and swallowed my soul.
~Wavy Gravy

Everyone who goes to a job he doesn’t like is a lot weirder than I am.
~Patch Adams

Part of positive psychology is about being positive, but sometimes laughter and clowns are not appropriate. Some people don’t want to be happy, and that’s okay. They want meaningful lives, and those are not always the same as happy lives.
~Eric Weiner

The person who knows how to laugh at himself will never cease to be amused.
~Shirley MacLaine

I’m the clown you take out of the box and wind up when you need a good laugh. And then, when you’re done with me, I go back in my box.
~Richard Simmons

I’ma be here for a while. None of these clowns can hurt me.
~J Cole

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Quotes harvested from:  https://azquotes.com, http://www.brainyquote.com, https://dailypnut.com, https://famousclowns.org/famous-clowns/clown-quotes-famous-sayings-clowns/,  https://goodreads.com, https://www.inspiringquotes.us/, http://www.quotegarden.com, https://wiseoldsayings.com

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Video Harvest: https://vimeo.com , https://youtube.com

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Quoted in The Grove:

The first thing which I can record concerning myself is, that I was born. These are wonderful words. This life, to which neither time nor eternity can bring diminution – this everlasting living soul, began. My mind loses itself in these depths.
~Groucho Marx

Birth, death, and suffering all bring us to the very edge of what our minds can understand.
~Ram Dass

What is this talked-of mystery of birth
But being mounted bareback on the earth?
~Robert Frost

EndQuote:
The first fact about the celebration of birthdays is that it is a good way of affirming defiantly, and even flamboyantly, that it is a good thing to be alive.
~G K Chesterton

 

~~

Exercise Prompt for 01/10:  clown

~ ~

 

Personality is immediately apparent, from birth, and I don’t think it really changes.
~Meryl Streep

You are born with a character; it is given, a gift, as the old stories say, from the guardians upon your birth…Each person enters the world called.
~James Hillman

Isn’t it true that the fault of birth rests somewhat on the child? I believe it’s we who led our parents on to bear us, and it’s our unborn children who make our flesh itch.
~T E Lawrence

~

Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.
~Erich Fromm

He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
~Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
~George Bernard Shaw

Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.
~Erich Fromm

~~

 

Posted from the Grove

2020 — The Year in Review

No mariner ever enters upon a more uncharted sea than does the average human being born in the 20th century. Our ancestors know their way from birth through eternity; we are puzzled about the day after tomorrow.
~Walter Lippmann

2020 is actually the number of days we’ve lived through already this year.
~Sara K Runnels

How many years did you live this week?
~Eric Swalwell

The Earth just sent us all to our rooms to think about what we’ve done.
~Internet meme

Dear 2020: Could you please stop trying to kill us for, like, five minutes?!
~Internet meme

Can we uninstall 2020 and re-install it? This version has a virus.
~Internet meme

It’s no longer 5:00 somewhere — it’s 2020 everywhere. Drink up!
~Internet meme

It’s not what you eat between Christmas and New Year’s that matters —it’s what you eat between New Year’s and Christmas that counts.
~William A Canady

Debating where to go on holiday this year. I think maybe upstairs.
~Matt Haig

The year 2020 has been the 1918 Spanish Flu, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s all rolled into one.
~Internet meme

On the one hand, it’s been a summer of protest, pandemic and economic hardship. On the other hand, the fresh corn is starting to come in.
~Robert Brault

An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.
~Bill Vaughan

That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
~Abraham Lincoln

~~

 

~Cee-Roo:  World Music 2020   (3:53)   2020 — year of images, to music
https://vimeo.com/channels/staffpicks/492754620

~

~The Atlantic:  Cracking the Sitcom Code:  Virtually all TV comedies, from Seinfeld to South Park, follow a simple formula.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/12/cracking-the-sitcom-code/384068/?utm_source

Thx to Rustie’s Electric Dream

 

~~

I need to get my life together, but I’m kinda waiting to see if the world is gonna end before I put in any real effort.
~Internet meme

A New Year’s resolution is something that goes in one year and out the other.
~William R Gerler

Many people look forward to the new year for a new start on old habits.
~Author unknown

Average life of a good resolution — Twenty minutes.
~Charles Searle

May all your troubles last as long as your New Year’s resolutions.
~Arnold Glasow

New Year’s Day — Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.
~Mark Twain

He who breaks a resolution is a weakling; He who makes one is a fool.
~F M Knowles

Many years ago I resolved never to bother with New Year’s resolutions, and I’ve stuck with it ever since.
~David J Beard

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results means you’re either insane or are making a New Year’s resolution.
~@thedeadauthor

But can one still make resolutions when one is over forty? I live according to twenty-year-old habits.
~André Gide

Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak. That is all that can be said for them. They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.
~Oscar Wilde

This year’s book, at midnight
turns to footnote in the next.
~Terri Guillemets

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
~T S Eliot

~~

VIDEO:

And if the problem [with contraception] is promiscuity, then why does the immense popularity of Viagra go unchecked? Doesn’t it make more sense to leave the bullets out of the gun than to try to avoid being shot? Especially when the gun is an old musket, and you have to clean it out and tamp down gunpowder, melt down scraps of lead and pour it into a mold, wait for it to cool – only to have it take forever to finally go off?
~Margaret Cho

According to the Western model, pregnancy is a disease, menopause is a disease, and even getting pregnant is a disease. Dangerous drugs and devices are given to women, but not to men- just for birth control. I’ve reached the conclusion that to many doctors BEING A WOMAN IS A DISEASE
~Barbara Seaman

Many of us know more about the workings of our car than we do the reproductive cycle.
~Jeannine Parvati Baker

~

Giving birth is little more than a set of muscular contractions granting passage of a child. Then the mother is born.
~Erma Bombeck

I wanted to give birth as opposed to being delivered!
~Ricki Lake

Birth is the pinnacle where women discover the courage to become mothers
~Anita Diamant

Birth is not only about making babies. Birth is about making mothers.
~Barbara Katz Rothman

We have a secret in our culture, it’s not that birth is painful, it’s that women are strong.
~Laura Stavoe Harm

Birthing is the most profound initiation to spirituality a woman can have.
~Robin Lim

~

Doth not a man die even in his birth? The breaking of prison is death, and what is our birth, but a breaking of prison?
~John Donne

Birth is violent, whether it be the birth of a child or the birth of an idea.
~Marianne Williamson

Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. … For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain.
~Oscar Wilde

If a woman doesn’t look like a Goddess during labor, then someone isn’t treating her right.
~Ina May Gaskin

~~

 

~Omeleto:  Tales From the Mulitverse   (7:03)   God, and a bad day with the kids, animated
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFTYbzEA6g4

~

~Omeleto:  Holy Moses w/ Amanda Seyfried  (14:50)   outlines of a miracle in the making
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEWvoKV92sY

 

~~

Adolescence is a new birth, for the higher and more completely human traits are now born.
~G Stanley Hall

My mother groaned, my father wept, into the dangerous world I leapt.
~William Blake

Leaving home in a sense involves a kind of second birth in which we give birth to ourselves.
~Robert Neelly Bellah

We are not born all at once, but by bits. The body first, and the spirit later; and the birth and growth of the spirit, in those who are attentive to their own inner life, are slow and exceedingly painful. Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth.
~Mary Antin

~

Youth is when you are allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve. Middle age is when you are forced to.
~Bill Vaughn

Middle age is having a choice between two temptations and choosing the one that’ll get you home earlier.
~Dan Bennett

The really frightening thing about middle age is the knowledge that you’ll grow out of it.
~Doris Day

It’s never too late to become what you want to be. Unless you want to be younger.
~Internet meme

Youth is a disease from which we all recover.
~Dorothy Fulheim

~

You’re not 40, you’re eighteen with 22 years experience.
~Author Unknown

They’re not gray hairs. They’re wisdom highlights.
~Author Unknown

Wisdom doesn’t necessarily come with age. Sometimes age just shows up all by itself.
~Tom Wilson

~~

 

MUSIC:

Birth was something that came quite unexpectedly, and afterwards there was one child more in the house.
~Georg Brandes

For far too many, pregnancy and birth is still something that happens to them rather than something they set out consciously and joyfully to do themselves
~Sheila Kitzinger

~

There is no way out of the experience except through it, because it is not really your experience at all but the baby’s. Your body is the child’s instrument of birth.
~Penelope Leach

Maybe I was just lucky, but I had the best pregnancy, and I loved giving birth. It was just the most amazing thing, so surreal but so real.
~Ashlee Simpson

I love being a mother. I loved being a daughter, a sister, a wife. I love being a woman with men. I love having given birth.
~Jessica Lange

The mind is more powerful than anything. So, during the birth I wasn’t thinking about the pain. I was in a meditation state. I was concentrating the whole time, thinking, ‘Oh my God, it’s time. I am going to meet my baby.’
~Gisele Bundchen

She was mine and not-mine all at once. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and the most terrifying.
~Erica Jong

It is a rare privilege to watch the birth, growth, and first feeble struggles of a living mind; this privilege is mine.
~Anne Sullivan Macy

Because they’ve either conveniently forgotten with time or they’re trying to be supportive, most mothers won’t tell you how hard pregnancy (and then childbirth) can be. Let me tell you, it is. It’s brutal sometimes! But, if I did it, ANYONE can do it. I mean, I always knew I was meant to do something really BIG in life, and now I know that this was it. Screw winning an Academy Award someday … I GAVE BIRTH
~Jenny McCarthy

I wish the world was run by women. Women who have given birth and know the value of their creation.
~Simin Daneshvar

Giving birth was easier than having a tattoo.
~Nicole Appleton

~~

~Ally McBeal – Barry White:  My First, My Last, My Everything   (4:33)   birthday party
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKT9JJ57Gok

~

~Steppenwolf:  Born To Be Wild – Aerosmith & Carrie Underwood cover   (4:35)   high energy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4TuzfZulkA

~

~Bruce Springsteen:  Born in the USA   (4:42)   unsanitized war
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2Hpo39FivM&t=1s

~

~Bruce Springsteen: Born To Run — Amy Macdonald cover (3:47)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nz4_UHCMqf0

~

~Robert Palmer & UB40:  I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight   (3:24)   love’s promise to a reggae beat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBcq5EzBcmQ

 

~~

I usually claim that pregnant women should not read books about pregnancy and birth. Their time is too precious. They should, rather, watch the moon and sing to their baby in the womb.
~Michel Odent

The moon is nothing
But a circumambulating aphrodisiac
Divinely subsidized to provoke the world
Into a rising birth-rate
~Christopher Fry

~

The fate of nations is intimately bound up with their powers of reproduction. All nations and all empires first felt decadence gnawing at them when their birth rate fell off.
~Benito Mussolini

It is an act of extreme selfishness for a married couple to refuse to have children when they are able to do so.
~Spencer W Kimball

I was blessed with a birth and a death, and I guess I just want some say in between.
~Ani DiFranco

~~

 

 

 

~~

Birthdays are good for you. Statistics show that the people who have the most live the longest.
~Larry Lorenzoni

I think of birth as the search for a larger apartment.
~Rita Mae Brown

Although it is generally known, I think it’s about time to announce that I was born at a very early age.
~Douglas Horton

If pregnancy were a book they would cut the last two chapters.
~Nora Ephron

If you want to know the feeling [of labor pain], just take your bottom lip and pull it over your head.
~Carol Burnett

Birth control that really works – every night before we go to bed we spend an hour with our kids.
~Roseanne Barr

My best birth control now is just to leave the lights on.
~Joan Rivers

My childhood may be over, but that doesn’t mean playtime is.
~Ron Olson

Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.
~Erma Bombeck

First you forget names; then you forget faces; then you forget to zip up your fly; and then you forget to unzip your fly.
~Branch Rickey

The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year’s Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you’re married to.
~P J O’Rourke

New Year’s Eve, where auld acquaintance be forgot. Unless, of course, those tests come back positive.
~Jay Leno

Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.
~Sam Levenson

One year they asked me to be poster boy – for birth control.
~Rodney Dangerfield

~

Did you ever notice that everyone in favour of birth control has already been born ?
~Benny Hill

By far the most common craving of pregnant women is not to be pregnant.
~Phyllis Diller

Statistics show that a soldier’s chances of survival in the front lines of combat are greater than the chances of an unborn child avoiding abortion. What should be the safest place to live in America – a mother’s womb – is now the most dangerous place.
~Randy Alcorn

~~

 

 

Colombian Cherub Askance
© Lucas Bautista

 

~~

Youth is not a question of years: one is young or old from birth.
~Natalie Clifford Barney

The two big advantages I had at birth were to have been born wise and to have been born in poverty.
~Sophia Loren

Strong and rare natures are thus created; misery, almost always a stepmother, is sometimes a mother; privation gives birth to power of soul and mind; distress is the nurse of self-respect; misfortune is a good breast for great souls.
~Victor Hugo

~

A man is great by deeds, not by birth.
~Chanakya

Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference.
~Voltaire

High birth is a gift of fortune which should never challenge esteem towards those who receive it, since it costs them neither study nor labor.
~Jean de la Bruyere

Labor gives birth to ideas.
~Jim Rohn

The winner’s edge is not in a gifted birth, a high IQ, or in talent. The winner’s edge is all in the attitude, not aptitude. Attitude is the criterion for success.
~Denis Waitley

A noble birth and fortune, though they make not a bad man good, yet they are a real advantage to a worthy one and place his virtues in a fairer light.
~George Lillo

No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth.
~Richard Dawkins

Well, we all are what we are, I guess you might say by an accident of birth.
~Wilford Brimley

He has not lived badly whose birth and death has been unnoticed by the world.
~Horace

~ ~

 

@Writers Platform

As a species, we are most animated when our days and nights on Earth are touched by the natural world. We can find immeasurable joy in the birth of a child, a great work of art, or falling in love.
~Richard Louv

There are all sorts of experiences we can’t really put a name to…The birth of a child, for one. Or the death of a parent. Falling in love. Words are like nets–we hope they’ll cover what we mean, but we know they can’t possibly hold that much joy, grief, or wonder. Finding God is like that, too. If it’s happened to you, you know what it feels like. But try to describe it to someone else–and language only takes you so far.
~Jodi Picoult

~

I believe in intuition and inspiration. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.
~Albert Einstein

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.
~Carl Jung

I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.
~Eleanor Roosevelt

A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.
~Norman Cousins

Ideas came with explosive immediacy, like an instant birth. Human thought is like a monstrous pendulum; it keeps swinging from one extreme to the other.
~Eugene Field

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
~Friedrich Nietzsche

 

~~

Exercise Prompt:  birth

~~

 

Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.
~Carl Sandburg

Writing is like giving birth to a piano sideways. Anyone who perseveres is either talented or nuts.
~Flannery O’Connor

An idea’s birth is legitimate if one has the feeling that one is catching oneself plagiarizing oneself.
~Karl Kraus

~

True stories, autobiographical stories, like some novels, begin long ago, before the acts in the account, before the birth of some of the people in the tale.
~Harold Brodkey

There is something about a poet which leads us to believe that he died, in many cases, as long as 20 years before his birth.
~James Thurber

~~

 

The Exercise:

~BarTalk:

being young

a porcupine
high in a tree
on a limb overhead
a boy with a .22
with friends
there was a bounty on them
the porcupines
who ate the bark off
trees needed for stuff
paper cardboard lumber
out on a limb

all those times
in those woods
only ever saw the one
the birth of experience
and it fell dead
at my feet
because I killed it
a denizen of the ecosystem
and we left it
tail intact

~

type writer

goals, time running out
birth of a cranky old man
running out of friends
pen of no use but a hobby
but nothing else matters

~

enterprise

dream-chance nation
birth of a notion
top berth cargo bay
stowaway

~

assorted loves

abiding consequence of love
a new layer of humanity
another kind of love discovered
not the kind that sighs and moans
nor the sort bows to royalty
or the patriotic loyalty kind
but captive and slave nevertheless
happily serving birth at her breast

~

5-7-5

goodbye to childhood
trained to let go of love’s pain
love’s orphan since birth

 

~~

The birth of a child is the imprisonment of a soul.
~William Gilmore Simms

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.
~Mark Twain

There should be weeping at a man’s birth, not at his death.
~Baron de Montesquieu

~

Birth and death; we all move between these two unknowns.
~Bryant H McGill

They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.
~Samuel Beckett

Birth and death are not two different states, but they are different aspects of the same state.
~Mahatma Gandhi

The death of what’s dead is the birth of what’s living.
~Arlo Guthrie

~

A man who’s never seen war is like a woman who’s never given birth…
~Andrei Platonov

If nature had arranged that husbands and wives should have children alternatively, there would never be more than three in a family.
~Laurence Housman

Women’s bodies have their own wisdom, and a system of birth refined over 100,000 generations is not so easily overpowered.
~Sarah J Buckley

~

We are African in origin and American in birth.
~Timothy Thomas Fortune

It was the rainbow gave thee birth, and left thee all her lovely hues.
~W H Davies

~

A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.
~Stendhal

To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.
~Erich Fromm

It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.
~James Joyce

~

BIRTH, n. The first and direst of all disasters. As to the nature of it there appears to be no uniformity. Castor and Pollux were born from the egg. Pallas came out of a skull. Galatea was once a block of stone. Peresilis, who wrote in the tenth century, avers that he grew up out of the ground where a priest had spilled holy water. It is known that Arimaxus was derived from a hole in the earth, made by a stroke of lightning. Leucomedon was the son of a cavern in Mount Etna, and I have myself seen a man come out of a wine cellar.
~Ambrose Bierce

Death is much simpler than birth; it is merely a continuation. Birth is the mystery, not death.
~Stewart Edward White

Life is like a very short visit to a toy shop between birth and death.
~Desmond Morris

What about the rest of life? Respect for the sanctity of life, if you believe that it begins at conception, cannot end at birth.
~Thomas Friedman

For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.
~William Blake

There’s people making babies to my music. That’s nice.
~Barry White

 

~ ~

Quotes harvested from:  https://azquotes.com, http://www.quotegarden.com  https://wiseoldsayings.com

~

Video Harvest:  https://vimeo.com, https://youtube.com

 

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