A Tribute to abra a collection of her comments

[LLapp]

"Happiness isn't something you experience, it's something you remember." — Oscar Levant

universalmom
April 30, 2014, 9:30 am
if you're happy and you know it...naaaah...

abra
September 2, 2015, 1:29 pm
Why not, universalmom? Clap 'em.

abra
October 23, 2015, 7:55 am
It would be sad to be happy, and not know it.

abra
August 13, 2016, 6:27 pm
Tonight we celebrated my birthday with our son and grandsons. I was happy and I DID know it.

[LLapp]

"My sister taught me everything I really need to know, and she was only in sixth grade at the time." — Linda Sunshine

abra
January 23, 2019, 1:53 pm
My older sister taught me so much. She was much nicer to me, than I was to my younger sisters. I have been missing her for over forty years.

[LLapp]

I love this whole thread, really. I'm putting it here because of abra's surprise anecdote at the end.

"Giving your son a skill is better than giving him one thousand pieces of gold." — Chinese Proverb

skoogie2
February 16, 2014, 7:37 am
If you give a man a fish....

kb83
March 13, 2014, 4:44 am
And giving him both is even better.

universalmom
April 28, 2014, 3:32 pm
i'm with you kb!

montyb
December 23, 2014, 5:04 pm
Well I was giving him a skull.

montyb
January 8, 2015, 9:17 am
This time i was giving him a still.

jval
January 28, 2015, 2:46 pm
I vote gold, not skill, skull or still or even spill.

skeeter
April 25, 2015, 3:33 pm
Like Monty, I gave him a still. If your'e the biggest bootlegger in Floyd County, Virginia, you've got yourself quite a living. His aged batches with a peach in the bottom of the quart jar (for taking out the toxins -- never eat the peach) are smoother than black Jack Daniels.

abra
July 1, 2015, 10:27 am
Skeeter, sounds like you know something about the whole process.

skeeter
September 30, 2015, 4:48 am
Mighty, mighty pleasin', pappy's corn squeezin', Whshhhoooh... white lightnin'. -- George Jones

munchlet
September 21, 2017, 4:39 pm
(hic)

kahvecowgirl
April 17, 2018, 11:05 am
A still! If only my parents had been so thoughtful. They even hid the beer when they left me alone.

abra
September 10, 2019, 7:37 pm
I know a woman who found a still under her house. Teenage son put a trapdoor in his closet, and installed a still. You never know. If you've got a teenager maybe you have a still.

abra
October 16, 2019, 10:49 pm
Maybe the trapdoor was already there. That makes more sense.

[Eureka]

"No facts are to me sacred - none are profane. I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back." — Ralph Waldo Emerson

WRQ9
November 27, 2013, 6:39 am
That is not to say that certain harmonic redundancies are not worthy of note, or even quite valuable. dare I suggest even precious.

LLapp
August 8, 2016, 1:39 pm
I notice that word "redundancies" appears in many of WRQ9's more oblique comments.

abra
June 21, 2020, 8:24 pm
Dare to say it WRQ9. Dare to say it. We won't get it but it will give us something to think about, and the world is a better place with preciously, redundant harmonic thingies.

Fudi
March 17, 2021, 10:49 pm
^Ha abra!!

LLapp
September 5, 2021, 4:35 am
Let's hear it for redundant harmonic thingies!

[LLapp]

Abra often apologized for her commas, but I always felt she had full poetic license for punctuation. The way she placed her commas, you could just hear her voice in the words.


"I roamed the countryside searching for answers to things I did not understand." — Leonardo da Vinci

emmatation
May 11, 2014, 11:31 am
This strikes me as a very hipster quote. Someone should photoshop it onto a stock photo of a meadow or something similar.

LLapp
June 30, 2015, 6:28 pm
I love that it comes from Leonardo -- that, after all, this genius of the ages was still a human being who sometimes struggled to understand things.

abra
August 7, 2015, 11:07 am
I think that it's wonderful, that someone, who probably, understood more that most of his contemporaries, went looking for more answers. I wonder what he was looking for.

bkmcincinnati
January 8, 2017, 1:05 am
abra: A long time ago I had a coworker (now deceased) who used commas like you do. I miss that.

LLapp
January 12, 2017, 8:16 pm
bkm: Yes, abra uses commas like poetry. She is quite the poet sometimes.

[Eureka]

"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible. " — Virginia Woolf

abra
June 4, 2016, 2:10 pm
She lost me at "spider".

[hrossa]

"The doctor knows what his trained eyes see - and he says it's the last of the ninth for me. So one more thing while the clouds loom dark and then I must leave this noisy park. "— Unattributed

chopstix
November 1, 2012, 7:58 pm
I wonder what that last request was?

Barnabas
March 11, 2013, 4:09 pm
I hope he fooled him and the game went into extra innings.

skoogie2
August 10, 2014, 12:50 pm
That's sad, I wonder who said it?

abra
August 10, 2015, 11:43 am
This doesn't seem like it should be unattributed, but googling only turns up UNKNOWN. I also didn't find any additional lines. I wanted to know what his "one more thing" was.

abra
June 30, 2016, 12:00 pm
Reminds me of Steve Goodman's A Dying Cub Fan's Last Request. If you don't know it,look for it on Youtube. Goodman was a genius.

abra
December 10, 2016, 2:13 pm
If you didn't know Steve Goodman before. You probably know him now. His Go Cubs Go became very well know this past season. He wrote Go Cubs Go, after A dying Cub Fan's Last request was criticized for being to dark. His ashes were scattered at Wrigley, without the consent of the management :0) In the song he calls it an "Ivy covered burial ground".

skeeter
March 17, 2017, 1:43 pm
I say we all hoist a Big Beer to his honor in the cheap seats at Fenway and sing "My Blue Heaven."

kb83
July 23, 2017, 2:36 pm
Extra innings sounds good.

munchlet
November 14, 2017, 1:25 pm
abra, I thought of Steve Goodman too. And I love his Dying Cub Fan's Last Request -- although last year we had a reprieve.
...

abra
September 18, 2018, 10:18 am
He told 'em, "It's late, and it's getting dark in here And I know it's to time to go But before I leave the lineup Boys, there's just one thing that I'd like to know "Do they still play the blues in Chicago When baseball season rolls around? When the snow melts away, do the Cubbies still play In their ivy-covered burial ground?
...

munchlet
December 9, 2020, 1:00 am
The dying man's friends told him to cut it out. They said, "Stop it" and "That's an awful shame." He whispered, "Don't cry, we'll meet by and by Near the heavenly hall of fame." He said, "I've got seasons tickets to watch the angels now. So it's just what I'm gonna do." He said, "But you the living, you're stuck here with the Cubs. So it's me who feels sorry for you"

[Eureka]

"Acting doesn't bring anything to a text. On the contrary, it detracts from it. " — Marguerite Duras

montyb
March 17, 2012, 7:08 pm
On the contrary, I read Shakespeare for years in school and didn't get it until I saw some well-acted plays and films. Now I can read him straight from the text.

maradnu
September 13, 2013, 3:38 am
Spoken like a writer. I have been both actor and writer, and acting can bring to life what can be very stale on the page - or it may kill it altogether.

saipanwriter
August 26, 2014, 12:45 am
writer here with actor child--I disagree with the quote. maradnu has it right--good acting can bring depth and shades of meaning lost on the page, adding valuable subtext. but bad acting can rob writing of its beauty.

ericthirdrow
October 14, 2014, 8:10 am
Marguerite Duras was probably thinking of Nicolas Cage when she said this.

YorkiesRule
May 30, 2015, 10:05 pm
I'm not a writer nor an actor, but you have to admit that absolute majority of movies based on books detract from the book and not add to it.

abra
June 12, 2016, 10:41 am
ericthirdrow, (whose name I love) made me laugh. I agree with Yorkies. Even when the acting is supurb, like TKAM, the book was still better.

darkyr
August 24, 2016, 6:28 am
I'm going to have some friends act out all these comments to see what dimension it adds.

abra
January 24, 2019, 6:29 pm
Darkyr, when you come to my comments, do you have a friend who looks a little like Nicole Kidman, well maybe one who looks like Maggie Smith might be closer.

[Eureka]

(I wonder how many names abra collected over the years.)

"My mother always used to say, 'There is no path to peace. Peace is the path.'" — Donald Freed

abra
June 15, 2019, 10:39 pm
It might be stretching a bit, but I'm adding Donald Freed to my list of quoters whose names are complete sentences.

[Synonymous]

Another classic humorous comment by abra:

"Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. "
— John Ruskin

Comments on this Puzzle:

slow1
January 2, 2016, 9:00 am
again! Why in the world would so many folks think this is offensive?
abra
July 1, 2017, 11:22 am
I truly think that there are a couple solvers who will mark a quote as offensive, just to see people react to it. Sort of their 3 seconds of fame.
susanith
October 31, 2017, 7:37 am
Hmm. The book of their art. I wonder how our nation would rate.
vintage38
December 10, 2017, 5:23 am
49 seconds
nedzeppelin1453
January 27, 2019, 7:03 am
A really good historical book can be all three.
skeeter
March 7, 2019, 4:24 pm
Maybe the offensive-markers misread the last word with an "f."
imsoeasy
April 2, 2019, 4:17 am
Great nations rise and fall, their books become dust.
badbob
September 11, 2019, 5:46 pm
who wrote the book of love?
jbb33054
October 9, 2019, 5:35 pm
57
abra
September 7, 2020, 2:21 am
The book of love is long and boring No one can lift the damn thing It's full of charts and facts and figures And instructions for dancing…
Eureka
March 15, 2021, 10:01 pm
LOL abra

[Abrasister]

Thank you all for your reposts of my sister's comments. I really enjoy scrolling through them all, when I find myself missing her. It seems like forever since I haven't heard her voice. Thank you again for this.

[Eureka]

Oh, I am thrilled to see that abra's sister has visited! Welcome! I know abra mentioned her sisters a number of times. I will try to find more examples to post here.

[hrossa]

Glad to have you, abra's sister! She is missed. It's why people like to post her comments!

[LLapp]

"Do not be surprised when those who ignore the rules of grammar also ignore the law. After all, the law is just so much grammar." — Robert Brault

montyb
November 2, 2014, 1:23 pm
That's why you should trust the folks at POEM, the Professional Organization of English Majors.

LLapp
April 30, 2015, 7:59 am
Injured? Victim of medical negligence? Call me! I understand sequence of tenses and I'll beat any lawyer's price!

Labole
August 1, 2015, 3:11 am
Hmm. Funny. Does he really believe that?

kb83
August 21, 2015, 4:38 am
Yes grammatical mistakes are a gateway offence.

abra
October 25, 2015, 12:06 pm
Of all the stupid Robert Brault quotes, this must be the most stupid. Either that, or I'll find myself in prison, for reckless but not willful misplacement of commas and semicolons.

momn8r
March 30, 2016, 10:27 am
i"ll bake you a cake with White Out inside!

killdozer
April 30, 2016, 8:25 am
Laws was made to be broke.

marnita
May 4, 2016, 2:02 pm
I would not send you to prison for your indiscriminate use of commas, abra, but I might sentence you to some compulsory training sessions with LLapp.

abra
August 11, 2016, 9:36 am
momn8r, thank you. More and more I realize I'm going to need that cake, oh and the White Out too.

abra
September 13, 2016, 12:27 pm
If he was serious, this says terrible things about the workings of his mind. I've never even had a traffic ticket. I've never broken a law, willfully or otherwise. Grammar, now that's an entirely different thing.

kb83
September 15, 2016, 10:10 am
Once you start splitting infinitives, it is a slippery slope.

momn8r
November 18, 2016, 1:22 pm
abra, chocolate or vanilla?

[Synonymous]

So very nice to see abra's sister here amongst us. Welcome and your sister is sorely missed. Thank you for the recognition. I hope the tree we planted in her honor is doing well.