“It was involuntary. They sank my boat”.

John F. Kennedy – on being asked how he became a war hero.

I didn’t go to church today,

I trust the Lord to understand.

The surf was swirling blue and white,

The children swirling on the sand.

He knows, He knows how brief my stay,

How brief this spell of summer weather,

He knows when I am said and done

We’ll have a plenty of time together.

Ogden Nash published this verse in 1968, three years before his death, in “There’s Always Another Windmill”.

Don’t go to a school reunion.

There’ll be a lot of old people there claiming to be your classmates.

Comedian/Actor Tom Dreesen.

Shy gold begins to peep through the sombre green –

the wattle’s wedding dress –

and Spring is near.

Then suddenly it seems,

one golden morning,

the Bush awakes, a living thing.

Flowers bloom, birds sing,

and all the world puts on it’s gayest dress

to greet the laughing Spring.

C. J. Dennis

I wandered lonely as a cloud

that floats on high o’er vales and hills,

when all at once I saw a crowd,

a host, of golden daffodils;

beside the lake, beneath the trees,

fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

William Wordsworth.

A sorrow shared is but half a trouble,

but a joy that’s shared is a joy made double.

That though the radiance which was once so bright

be now forever taken from my sight.

Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, glory in the flower.

We will grieve not,

rather find strength in what remains behind.

William Wordsworth.

If you drink, you die.

If you don’t drink, you die just the same.

So drink!

A sign in a Nice bar (translated from French).

Hope is like the sun, which, as we journey toward it,

casts the shadow of our burden behind us.

Scottish Author: Samuel Smiles..

British scientists were eager to try out their new air pollution monitoring equipment – to their amazement, readings in Newcastle, England, showed that it was the most polluted city in England, if not the world. What could possibly be causing these extraordinarily high results? A strange hitherto undiscovered weather anomaly? A series of gigantic coal plants that had somehow been overlooked?

In time, the true reason was discovered. Technicians had forgotten to double-check where in Newcastle their equipment had been placed – by a junior staffer. It was in a parking lot where dozens of diesel trucks came and went twenty-four hours a day!

Well, it did say, this was a Park!