<wssi: quotations>

...now the youth structure of all your world broken twisted on electric fence at the barrier have i done the job here will he hear it a distant hand lifted 1920 window child fingers tap the glass all the dream people of past time are saying goodbye for ever mister sad servant shadows of late afternoon against his back magic of all movies in remembered kid standing there face luminous by the attic window in a lost street of brick chimneys a little wind stirs dust around his bare feet silver ghostboy exploded star between us...

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

Being a star has made it possible for me to get insulted in places where the average Negro could never hope to go and get insulted.

My only regret in the theatre is that I could never sit out front and watch me.

What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can't move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternately, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won't be troubling you much longer.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,/How I wonder what you are,/Up above the world so high,/Like a diamond in the sky!

The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.

Masters, spread yourselves.

- William S. Burroughs, "Proclaim Present Time Over," The Award Avant-Garde Reader (1965)

- Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: an Autobiography Revisited (1999)

- Sammy Davis, Jr., Yes, I Can: The Story of Sammy Davis, Jr. (1965)

- John Barrymore, as Eddie Canton in The Way I See It (1959)

- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)

- Anne Taylor and Jane Taylor, "The Star," Rhymes for the Nursery (1806)

- Henry Louis Mencken, The American Mercury (1924)

- W. Shakespeare, King Richard II (1595)