We are all born mad. Some of us remain so.

I've decided there are too many quotes on this blog; this goes with the belief that the postings completely lack a means to an end, and more importantly are of no service. Therefore, the most effective thing for me to do is to use this to reflect on my teaching practices. Hopefully, it will make me a better teacher. At the very least, it will let me tread between the "apogees and nadirs" of my first year in pedagogical practice. (yea astronomy!)

I'd like to commemorate this momentous moment (and teaching) with two (unnecessary) quotes, both by Samuel Beckett:

It will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on. -- The Unnamable

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. -- Worstward Ho

FAULKNER.

"Yes. They lead beautiful lives - women. Lives not only divorced from, but irrevocably excommunicated from, all reality. That's why although their deaths, the instant of dissolution, are of no importance to them since they have a courage and fortitute in the face of pain and annihilation which would make the most spartan man resemble a puling boy, yet to them their funerals and graves, the little puny affirmations of spurious immortality set above their slumber, are of incalculable importance. You had an aunt once (you do not remember her because I never saw her myself but only heard the tale) who was faced with a serious operation which she became convinced she would not survive, at a time when her nearest female kin was a woman between whom and herself there had existed for years one of those bitter inexplicable (to the man mind) amicable enmities which occur between women of the same blood, whose sole worry about departing this world was to get rid of a certain brown dress which she owned and knew that the kinswoman knew she had never liked, which must be burned, not given away but burned in the back yard beneath the window where, by being held up to the window (and suffering excruciating pain) she could see it burned with her own eyes, because she was convinced that after she died the kinswoman, the logical one to take charge, would bury her in it."

"And did she die?" Quentin said.

"No. As soon as the dress was consumed she began to mend. She stood the operation and recovered and outlived the kinswoman by several years. Then one afternoon she died peacfully of no particular ailment and was buried in her wedding gown."

"Oh," Quentin said.