Quotations Weblog

CBS’s series Criminal Minds started its second season Wednesday, and I’m pleased to report that it’s just as obsessed with quotations as before. I was also pleasantly surprised that the bizarre puzzle created by the kidnapper actually had a solution—some enterprising folks on the net even figured it out between seasons.

Since I’ve written about the show before, we get many questions each time an episode airs about the quotations used in the show. I’ll try to keep up this season and post them every week. Here are the quotations from Season 2 episode 1:

I haven’t verified the source of either of these, but they appear here exactly as read on the show.

While I’m answering questions, the song played at the end of the episode was “The Riddle” by Five for Fighting, and the Chaucer poem that the kidnapper quoted from was The Parliament of Fowls. Any American TV show that quotes La Rochefoucauld and Chaucer in the same episode is worth watching in my book.

About once a month, someone attempts to correct us on the quotation above. Kilgore Trout, as they know, is a fictional character that appears in several of Kurt Vonnegut’s works, so they assume we’ve mistakenly attributed the quotation to Philip Jose Farmer.

As it turns out, our attribution is correct: While Kurt Vonnegut invented the fictional Kilgore Trout, and also invented his fictional novel Venus on the Half Shell, a real novel was later published with the same title, by an author using the pseudonym Kilgore Trout, who turned out to be Philip Jose Farmer. I’m not certain whether Vonnegut gave permission for the use of the title, but he disapproved of the final result.

For more information:

• Wikipedia – Kilgore Trout

Have you tried our Your Quotations Page feature? If you sign up and log in, you can store a number of your favorite quotations on your own page. Just click the [+] icon next to any quotation on any page to add it to your page.

You were originally limited to 100 quotations on your page, but last week we increased the limit to 1000 by popular request.

We will also be enhancing this feature by the end of September to allow you to share your collected quotations with friends and others—stay tuned.

Back in 2004, I wrote an entry on my personal blog about this quotation:

• Pick Me! » The Happiness Butterfly

It has been a very popular entry because I challenged my readers to post in the comments if they ever have a butterfly alight on them. The comments are worth a read because some of them have been truly inspiring. One in particular was inspiring and she had the lovely picture to prove it:

• Pick Me! » Butterflies DO Land On People

Since then, I HAVE had butterflies alight upon me. Here is a picture that Mike took when it happened:

It has been five years since the September 11th attacks on American soil. So much has changed since then. When we were all hurt and suffering because of the loss of life, many of us collected quotations to ease our hearts’ grief. Here are a couple of those collections:

• 911: Quotes

• Anti-War Quotes

There are many compelling stories about 9/11, but this one really struck a chord for me. It is from a minister who lived in New York at the time of the attacks, but was moved to Michigan soon afterward:

• uuworld.org : american myths reconsidered

He ministered to the people who were there and the people who weren’t. Of the two, he believes that those of us who watched the tragedy from afar struggled more.

“On hearing that I was in New York City on 9/11, people in Grand Rapids almost to a person say, ‘That must have been so hard.’ What I hear is their own fear and that curious thing called survivor’s guilt. I often reply to their sympathy by saying, ‘It was hard, yes, but I think you had it far worse. Our loss was palpable. Yours was all subjective, the stuff of dreams. You saw the tapes play over and over but did not see the kids in the playgrounds the next day or that we went back to work the day after that. You heard the dire predictions and gloomy analyses, but did not see that life pressed on. The Pile, as the workers called it, was not the whole city.’”

“I saw the contrast between the sunny weather, singing birds, and playing children, and the smoking rubble. Which was the foreground and which the background? Is the world a perilous place occasionally redeemed by shafts of sunlight and hope? Or is it a noble and beautiful place sometimes bruised by the consequences of chance?”

I believe that deep down at its core, our existence is based on pure joy. It is the darkness that creeps in that clouds this joy. Don’t let the darkness cloud your inner core of happiness today or any day.