So you see, when war comes to one’s village, one’s doorstep, it isn’t tragic and impersonal any longer. It is just an excuse to vomit private hatred. That is why I am not a great patriot.
I profess not to know how women's hearts are wooed and won. To me they have always been matters of riddle and admiration. Some seem to have but one vulnerable point, or door of access; while others have a thousand avenues, and may be captured in a thousand different ways. It is a great triumph of skill to gain the former, but a still greater proof of generalship to maintain possession of the latter, for man must battle for his fortress at every door and window. He who wins a thousand common hearts is therefore entitled to some renown; but he who keeps undisputed sway over the heart of a coquette is indeed a hero.
Tonight as I sat at Starbucks I couldn't help overhearing the conversation of two people that had obviously just met for the first time.
Throughout his life, Albert Einstein would retain the intuition and the awe of a child. He never lost his sense of wonder at the magic of nature's phenomena-magnetic fields, gravity, inertia, acceleration, light beams-which grown-ups find so commonplace. He retained the ability to hold two thoughts in his mind simultaneously, to be puzzled when they conflicted, and to marvel when he could smell an underlying unity. "People like you and me never grow old," he wrote a friend later in life. "We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born." 
I am writing this from the actual bookstore, actually from the Starbucks section of the place, where I am enjoying a serious caffeine buzz from my third grande bold coffee!
Hello, dear Blogfriends.
The lord had made some very bad choices when it came to inaugurating the garden of eden, in this particular game of roulette everyone had lost, in this target practice for the blind no one had scored.
"Where's Patrice these days?"
I've spent a sizable chunk of my first day of holidays IN my books.
Now, my friend and I [tomorrow] are going to saw holes through my beloved book racks so that cords can fit through, threading their way to the new Samsung, yonder. I will also have new "cable" internet as opposed to my DSL I've had for fifteen years now, plus a better phone plan.
I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.
I've yet to be on a campus where most women weren't worrying about some aspect of combining marriage, children, and a career. I've yet to find one where many men were worrying about the same thing. 
WARNING: The following blog is yet another instalment in the continuing series entitled TTDMYITATA©. [Things That Don't Matter Yet I Talk About Them Anyway.]
Agnostics may yearn for God or paternal or spiritual sustenance or transcendence, but agnostics remain waiting. We are like Keats's youthful lover chasing the young woman on the Grecian urn in suspended Attic time, not catching or holding what seems never to stop eluding us.
<-- I'm reading a fascinating book about agnosticism.
