the sloppy duck

I get scared that all the little thoughts and memories and tidbits that make me smile and laugh will be forgotten, and nobody will ever know about them. So I'll put them here. And maybe others can pretend like they get it.

“Never in all human history has there been such glory; never have the eyes of mortals beheld such royal pageantry! Trappers and hunters have perished in the icy wastes of the arctic to bring the ermines and sables in which these queens are robed; divers have been torn by sharks to bring up their pearls from the depths of tropic seas, and miners have been crushed in the deep earth to dig their blazing diamonds; chemists have blown themselves up in search for their cosmetics and dyes, and seamstresses have grown blind embroidering the elaborate designs which twinkle upon their silken ankles. All this concentrated in one brief glory-march— do you wonder that heads are high and glances regal? Or that the crowd surges, and rushes wildly, and women faint, and ambulances come clanging?”
—   Oil! - Upton Sinclair

“Verily, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the feelings of the disinherited.”
—   Oil! - Upton Sinclair

“It was a world in which some people worked all the time, and others played all the time. To work all the time was a bore, and no one would do it unless he had to; but to play all the time was equally a bore, and the people who did it never had anything to talk about that Bunny wanted to listen to. They talked about their play, just as solemnly as if it had been work: tennis tournaments, golf tournaments, polo matches— all sorts of complicated ways of hitting a little ball about a field! Now, it was all right, when you needed exercise and recreation, to go out and hit a little ball; but to make a life-work of it, to give all your time and thought to it, to practice it religiously, read and write books about it, discuss it for hours on end— Bunny looked at these fully grown ment and women, with their elaborate outfits of “sport clothes,” and it seemed to him they must be exercising a kind of hypnosis upon themselves, to make themselves believe that they were really enjoying themselves.”
—   Oil! - Upton Sinclair

“But human beings were miserable, millions of them, and why could they not learn to be happy in such a world? It was springtime all over the country, and yet everybody was preparing to go to war, and form vast armies, and kill other people, also groping for happiness! Everybody said that it had to be; and yet something in Bunny would not cease to dream of a world in which people did not maim and kill one another, and destroy, not merely the happiness of others, but their own.”
—   Oil! - Upton Sinclair

“Yes, life was strange— and cruel. You lived in the little narrow circle of your own consciousness, and, as people said, what you didn’t know didn’t hurt you. Your Thanksgiving dinner was spoiled, because one poor laborer had slid down into a well which you happened to own; but dozens and perhaps hundreds of men had been hurt in other wells all over the country, and that didn’t trouble you a bit. For that matter, think of all the men who were dying over there in Europe! All the way from Flanders to Switzerland the armies were hiding in trenches, bombarding each other day and night, and thousands were being mangled just as horribly as by a grab in the bottom of a well; but you hadn’t intended to let that spoil your Thanksgiving dinner, not a bit! Those men didn’t mean as much to you as the quail you were going to kill the next day!”
—   Oil! - Upton Sinclair
So I made a wee mistake…. Everything in the Styrofoam cups was in my greenhouse for a few months. Anyway I guess my chart blew off my balcony or something so now I have noooo clue wtf these little plants are. Oops! Kinda wanted to take a pic everyday so see if they grow or die so hopefully if they survive the transplant someone on this site can help identify.

So I made a wee mistake…. Everything in the Styrofoam cups was in my greenhouse for a few months. Anyway I guess my chart blew off my balcony or something so now I have noooo clue wtf these little plants are. Oops! Kinda wanted to take a pic everyday so see if they grow or die so hopefully if they survive the transplant someone on this site can help identify.

“Mihail Fyodorovitch speaks evil of everything. Katya listens, and neither of them notices into what depths the apparently innocent diversion of finding fault with their neighbors is gradually drawing them. They are not conscious how by degrees simple talk passes into malicious mockery and jeering, and how they are both beginning to drop into the habits and methods of slander.”
—   A Dreary Story - Chekhov

“One is shy of asking men under sentence what they have been sentenced for; and in the same way it is awkward to ask very rich people what they want so much money for, why they make such poor use of their wealth, why they don’t give it up, even when they see in it their unhappiness; and if they begin a conversation about it themselves, it is usually embarrassing, awkward, and long.”
—   A Doctor’s Visit - Chekhov

“I understood that when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all.”
—   About Love - Anton Chekhov
damn i’d love to jump into this picture!!!! too cute!

damn i’d love to jump into this picture!!!! too cute!

(Source: cutest-cats, via cutest-cats)