Quotes

I've been collecting a few quotes for sometime now. They are from the movies I liked, from the people I admire - actors and musicians and such, from the articles I've read - It's a personal collection. So here it is!

"Running introduces you to your worst enemy, to that person who tells you, "Ooh, our ankles hurt and we should stop. Why do we need to run eight kilometers? Let us run five". That is the same person who says to the man," Hey, your wife will never find out if you sleep with her," and the same person who tells a 16-year old, "you are not gonna be cool if you do not smoke it". If you start giving in to that person, you will never get to your goals"

- Will Smith

"Music should reach out to people, you can't afford to be so introverted. I think that anything that reaches out and touches people emotionally is doing a service whether people understand why it's moving them or not. We always wanted our music to have heart, you know. That's why we sometimes sound a little weird and cranky 'cause we always try to leave the heart in. And also, we always wanted our records to be like doors to other worlds. We wanted to say, 'Look, here's the door, why not open it and walk through to the otherside and maybe take a look around and see if you like it?'"

- Peter Buck (R.E.M.)

I tell people,"Start your career tomorrow. If you had a bad year, learn from it and do better. If you had a good year, I've already forgotten about it"

- Jeffery R. Immelt
CEO & Chairman, GE

"If you're smart, you'll always be humble. You can learn all you want, but there'll always be somebody who's never read a book who'll know twice what you know."

- David Duchovny


Gavin Banek: "It's like you go to the beach. You go down to the water. It's a little cold. You're not sure you want to go in. There's a pretty girl standing next to you. She doesn't want to go in either. She sees you, and you know that if you just asked her her name, you would leave with her. Forget your life, whoever you came with, and leave the beach with her. And after that day, you remember. Not every day, every week... she comes back to you. It's the memory of another life you could have had. Today is that girl."

- from "Changing Lanes"

This one's not exactly a quote, just a piece of dialog. If you have seen the movie, you'll know!

Will: Do you like apples?
Clark: Yeah.
Will: Well, I got her number. How do you like them apples?

- from "Good Will Hunting"

a song for the summer (respite)

I want to go
someplace colder
where the trees shiver
and sunlight seldom wanders

the night is icy blue
the day shiny cool
the coffee ever lasting
a fireplace for the fool

the smoke rings remind
the days foregone
the foggy window
forever alone

the air so clear
the leaves are frosty
the moon at the horizon
so cool and mighty!

Nocturnal

All the crazy things to write , that’s what gets decided when they come inside the brain , but when you start writing , oh boy, they are no more. What if you saw people on the street outside your house at three fifty in the morning, with torches. Imagine that – you are trying to sleep but can’t. Some random, stupid, may be uncompleted wishes (read ‘Should have asked her out….or’ Should I still?’ ‘What’s with the age thing anyway, doesn’t make much sense. Much? No sense’) and crazy thoughts, like how would a bullet from an ak 47 would feel hitting you and twisting its way inside the flesh would feel. This might sound like a dream of a sadist, but given the position acquired by this weapon in pop-psyche, its no wonder. Or if you really want a milder version, how about shooting someone else, or being a Special Forces member or something, and may be an MP5 or an M16 instead. Anyway, going a bit too wide of the middle stick here. So you are trying to sleep. The bed is perpendicular to the road, with your head to the wall and legs towards the street.

Scene 1
A quiet street, late at night…It’s a street in a residential area; houses on both sides…most of the houses are right on the steet without any porches or verandas. There are three guys in a house. Say post grad students.

(In the house)

Lights are out. All are asleep except one. He is twisting and turning, trying to stay still. Rest is not assured for him tonight. He hears some murmur outside. May be a dog sniffing at a bush. But those are footsteps, like feathers dropping on tin. The window is right behind him, He moves his head up, he can see the trees at the other side of the road, the leaves enjoying a late night breeze.Suddenly,the first flame appears, immediately followed by the other and then the next. The same view is on the other side. They are parallel running.
He is dumb founded. Not sure if scared, may be thrilled.
The torch bearers are clad in uniforms, ritual like. Kind of KKK, but not white, and certainly not with a pointed hood and a child in one arm. The faces are visible, but they have no vision. The vision is fixed somewhere ahead. They are drawn towards a larger flame it seems. Now there is a third row, walking in between the two lines….

They finally finish. He is still, playing it again and again. I could have taken that on video, given I had a camera. The beauty of it he can not deny. Will this occur again? May be. Goes back to the bed. His own response seems too cold for him. This is like none other, this is X Files stuff; well this ain’t Roswell either. He laughs at that one. Is an explanation necessary? Who cares who they were. Some cult which believes in not disturbing people by not making any noise. Oh but if some pudding hearted fool sees this at 4 o clock in the morning, he is going to think the British have come again to claim one of their biggest colonies back, and a Satyagraha is already underway.Hmmm.He might as well wake the entire street up and call up the fire brigade. Who knows.

A star is not alone

A star is not alone. At least 3/4^th of them aren’t. They have companions. Take Castor for example, in the constellation of Taurus. It is made of SIX stars! Three pairs of revolving binaries, and they are separable only by a spectroscope - by differentiating between their individual spectra. It will be amazing to travel to such a star system. Just imagine watching six stars revolving around each other – well it is not that simple, but the view would be breathtaking!

Paired stars are not uncommon, it’s the loners like our Sun that are. One of the early theories about the extinction of dinosaurs assumed that the Sun had a companion. It was the proximity of that other star, during one of its revolutions that produced imbalance in the Earth’s ecosystem, resulting in the destruction of the giant reptiles. If so, that buddy star should have been found by now, and its orbit determined.

Another exciting phenomenon occurs when one of the stars dies and becomes a black hole – you have a scene where one star is revolving around nothing, since the black hole will only be visible in x-ray or infrared wavelengths!