We held hands on the last night on earth. Our mouths filled with dust, we kissed in the fields and under trees, screaming like dogs, bleeding dark into the leaves. It was empty on the edge of town but we knew everyone floated along the bottom of the river. So we walked through the waste where the road curved into the sea and the shattered seasons lay, and the bitter smell of burning was on you like a disease.In our cancer of passion you said, 'Death is a midnight runner.' The sky had come crashing down like the news of an intimate suicide. We picked up the shards and formed them into shapes of stars that wore like an antique wedding dress. The echoes of the past broke the hearts of the unborn as the ferris wheel silently slowed to a stop. The few insects skidded away in hopes of a better pastime. I kissed you at the apexof the maelstrom and asked if you would accompany me ina quick fall, but you made me realize that my ticket wasn't good for two. I rode alone. You said,'The cinders are falling like snow.' There is poetry in despair, and we sang with unrivaled beauty, bitter elegies of savagery and eloquence.Of blue and grey. Strange, we ran down desperate streets and carvedour names in the flesh of the city. The sun has stagnated somewhere beyond the rim of the horizon and the darkness is a mystery of curves and line.Still, we lay under the emptiness and drifted slowly outward,and somewhere in the wilderness we foundsalvation scratched into the earth like a message. the untitled poem--afi
|
Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. Wouldn't you say, she asked, that killings like this are influenced by violent movies? No, I said, I wouldn't say that. But what about 'Basketball Diaries'? She asked. Doesn't that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun? The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office, and it's unlikely the Columbine killers saw it. The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. Events like this, I said, if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; These two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory.
|
O Star-eyed Science! hast thou wandered there, to waft us home the message of despair?
|
All major religious traditions carry basically the same message, that is love, compassion and forgiveness the important thing is they should be part of our daily lives.
|
To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be published at all. A message from the gods should be delivered at once. It is damnably blasphemous to talk about the autumn season and so on. How dare the author or publisher demand a price for doing his duty, the highest and most honorable to which a man can be called?
|
Whenever you have truth it must be given with love, or the message and the messenger will be rejected
|
What the hell is nostalgia doing in a science-fiction film? With the whole universe and all the future to play in, Lucas took his marvelous toys and crawled under the fringed cloth on the parlor table, back into a nice safe hide hole, along with Flash Gordon and the Cowardly Lion and Luke Skywalker and the Flying Aces and the Hitler Jugend. If there's a message there, I don't think I want to hear it.
|
President Reagan was a formidable political campaigner, who provided an inspirational voice to America when our people were searching for a clear message of hope and confidence,
|
The butterfly's attractiveness derives not only from colors and symmetry: deeper motives contribute to it. We would not think them so beautiful if they did not fly, or if they flew straight and briskly like bees, or if they stung, or above all if they did not enact the perturbing mystery of metamorphosis: the latter assumes in our eyes the value of a badly decoded message, a symbol, a sign.
|
Another possible source of guidance for teenagers is television, but television's message has always been that the need for truth, wisdom and world peace pales by comparison with the need for a toothpaste that offers whiter teeth *and* fresher breath.
|
I graduated pretty quickly. When I was eleven or twelve a close friend of the family got lynched. I guess he was about forty years old, married, and we used to play with his kids. I remember the Saturday night a bunch of white men beat him to death at the Decatur fairgrounds because he sassed back a white woman. They just left him dead on the ground. Everyone in town knew it but never said a word in public. I went down and saw his bloody clothes. They left those clothes on a fence for about a year. Every Negro in town was supposed to get the message from those clothes and I can see those clothes now in my mind's eye.... But nothing was said in public. No sermons in church. No news. No protest. It was as though this man just dissolved except for the bloody clothes.... Just before I went into the Army I began wondering how long I could stand it. I used to watch the Saturday night sport of white men trying to run down a Negro with their car, or white gangs coming through town to beat up a Negro.
|
If The Beatles or the 60's had a message, it was ' Learn to swim. And once you've learned - swim! '
|
To renounce the alcoholic world is not to abandon it, but to act upon principles I have come to love and cherish, and to restore in others - who still suffer - the serenity I have come to know. When I am truly committed to this purpose, it matters little what clothes I wear or how I make a living. My task is to carry the message, and to lead by example, not design.
|
The reason I became a candidate is because nobody was delivering the message of what the Democratic party was about. Nobody was out there delivering the message with any fire.
|
The thing about hip-hop today is it's smart, it's insightful. The way they can communicate a complex message in a very short space is remarkable.
|
Religion and Magic are the same thing. For instance a priest will look in a room and believe he saw a divine message and will not enter so he doesn't anger the Gods, whereas a witch will look in a room and say she saw a ghost and will not enter the room or she will be possesed. Both say something completelydifferent about the same thing. However, an atheist will look in a room, walk in and remove the sheet from the back of the chair.
|
The question confronting the Church today is not any longer whether the man in the street can grasp a religious message, but how to employ the communications media so as to let him have the full impact of the Gospel message.
|
We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things -- the teacher of all truth.
|
It was very important for us to send a message to the new Palestinian leadership that if [they intended] to abrogate signed international agreements in an effort to advance their extremist agenda, they should not be surprised if Israel acts to defend its citizens and its interests.
|
You can speak well if your tongue can deliver the message of your heart.
|
If there be any truer message of a man than by what he does, it must be by what he gives.
|
To hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too weak, but because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known and not known: I want you to know that I don't want to show my feelings: that is the message I address to the other.
|
if once the message greet him That his True Love doth stay, If Death should come and meet him, Love will find out the way!
|
When Paul went to the Jew first, it was not because it seemed that Israel might yet accept Christ and His kingdom, but simply because God would leave Israel no excuse for rejecting Messiah. Paul confirmed Peter's message, and mightily contended with the Jews everywhere that 'Jesus is the Christ.' And miracles accompanied this confirmation testimony--greater miracles, indeed, than Peter himself had wrought. But, unlike Peter, Paul never offered the kingdom to Israel. His ministry among them was not to turn the nation to Christ, but to save any from among them who might believe, receiving salvation by grace, and to leave the rest without excuse. Thus God was concluding Israel in unbelief and, even at that early date, mightily using Paul to proclaim grace to the Gentiles.
|
The Revelation speaks powerfully today, and its message to us is the same as it was to the early Church: that there is not a square inch of ground in heaven or on earth or under the earth in which there is peace between Christ and Satan.
|
In the world to which the Apostles preached their new message, religion had not been the solace of the weary, the medicine of the sick, the strength of the sin-laden, the enlightenment of the ignorant: It was the privilege of the healthy and the instructed. The sick and the ignorant were excluded. They were under the bondage of evil demons.
|
Punishing the prostitute promotes the rape of all women. When prostitution is a crime, the message conveyed is that women who are sexual are bad, and therefore legitimate victims of sexual assault. Sex becomes a weapon to be used by men.
|
This album is about exchanging ideas. It's about getting a message out. It's about empowering people by giving them a voice. I know not everyone believes what I say is what they think, but red and blue is not black and white. We're all together. It's a record about unification.
|
.....if you're driving down the highway in the middle of the night and you see a sign that says Bridge Out, pray for some intellectual understanding of that message, or you're going to have an experience you'll never forget
|
Use it up ... Wear it out. Make it do ... Or do without.
|