Mike Crowl's Scribble Pad
Recent and old
quotations from a variety of sources, randomly chosen, in a kind of blog.  
These are the ones I listed in early 2003.

Archives
Aug-Oct 2003 and Nov 2003
Jan 2005
and Feb/March 2005

Quotes Archives One - August to October 2003
[8th Oct, 2003]

An obituary?

Justice Young, reported in the Otago Daily Times, 8th Oct, 2003, in relation to a case where a family tried to overturn a will which had given Percy Wheatley's entire estate to the Royal NZ Foundation for the Blind.

Mr Wheatley led a 'strange and strictured life' by orthodox standards and became 'increasingly cranky' with age.

'For instance, a dispute over money involving his brother Stan and dating back to 1928 was still reverberating in his mind 68 years later as it is reflected in his will instructions to the trust in 1966.

'He did not like being crossed, was mean spirited about money, had little or no interest in the outside world, did not take newspapers, and di not have a telephone until he was in his eighties and it was presumably required given his declining health.

"He was not a member of any outside organisations and he did not form enduring relationships with people outside the circle of his family. He died, as he lived, friendless.'


[7th Oct, 2003]

Lady Macochie, in The Scotsman, 11th Sept 1967

Awake, my muse, bring bell and book
To curse the hand that cuttings took.
May every sort of garden pest
His little plot of ground infest
Who stole the plants from Inverewe,
From Falkland Palace, Crathes too.
Let caterpillars, capsid bugs,
Leaf-hoppers, thrips, all sorts of slugs,
Play havoc with his garden plot,
And a late frost destroy the lot.

[13 Sept, 2003]

Various short entries from family members and other sources:

Libby Crowl
- in answer to any question of a theological nature:

I know: God!

Abby Crowl - quoting something she'd read:

On one side of a child's life their parents are teaching them to walk and talk; on the other side of a child's life their parents are telling them to sit down and shut up.

Ben Crowl - after being pushed too far:

You don't know how much you hurt people, sometimes!

An economist after the 1985 NZ Budget:

People will start looking at their liquidity horizons…

Dr Alvin Magary (quoted by Marianne Moore in The Poet's Work, pge 221)

We do not praise God by dispraising man.

From Thruway, a children's book:

Then a faster bus passed us…

Graffiti - in relation to NZ's much debated Treaty of Waitangi:

Trick or Treaty?

Line from a television advertisement:

I do like hard work - I could watch it for hours.

Chas, a character in a tv program called C.A.T.S - in an episode shown 14.6.88:

…couple of pen-pushing nose-drips…


[7th Sept, 2003]

Talks to Teachers - chapter one, by William James

The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of ethics (if there be such a thing) never made a man behave rightly. The most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly; and to criticise ourselves more articulately after we have made such mistakes. A science only lays down lines within which the rules o f the art must fall, laws which the follower of the art must not transgress; but what particular thing he shall do within those lines is left exclusively to his own genius. One genius will do his work well and succeed in one way, while another succeeds as well quite differently, yet neither will transgress the lines.


[28th August, 2003]
The following poem was found in an old book on OC Books' secondhand shelves.  It has no author, although the book once belonged to Gerry (?) Wiltshire, who studied at St John's College, Auckland, NZ, in 1924.

For days I've searched the Book with diligence
To find a passage or a reference
To match yours from Deuteronomy
Where you're empowered with autonomy
To proceed along in lower gear
For the remainder of the year.
But somehow I cannot find
A verse to say what I had in mind.
So if there's a function you detesteth
Remain absent, Neil - we will explain -
"This Year the Vicar Resteth!" [written March 1980]


[27th August, 2003]  
Herman Melville, from chapter XXXII of Moby Dick.    

For be a man's intellectual superiority what it will, it can never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts or entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry or base. This it is, that for ever keeps God's true princes of the Empire from the world's hustings, and leaves the highest honour that this air can give, to those men who became famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass. Such large virtue lurks in these small things when extreme political superstitions invest them, that in some royal instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted potency.

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