Linux Literature

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact...
                -- Wm. Shakespeare, "A Midsummer Night's Dream"

The man who sets out to carry a cat by its tail learns something that
will always be useful and which never will grow dim or doubtful.
                -- Mark Twain

The naked truth of it is, I have no shirt.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Love's Labour's Lost"

        "...The name of the song is called 'Haddocks' Eyes'!"
        "Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?" Alice said, trying to
feel interested.
        "No, you don't understand," the Knight said, looking a little
vexed.  "That's what the name is called.  The name really is, 'The Aged
Aged Man.'"
        "Then I ought to have said "That's what the song is called'?"
Alice corrected herself.
        "No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing!  The song is
called 'Ways and Means':  but that's only what it is called you know!"
        "Well, what is the song then?" said Alice, who was by this
time completely bewildered.
        "I was coming to that," the Knight said.  "The song really is
"A-sitting on a Gate": and the tune's my own invention."
                --Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking Glass"

The notes blatted skyward as they rose over the Canada geese, feathered
rumps mooning the day, webbed appendages frantically pedaling unseen
bicycles in their search for sustenance, driven by cruel Nature's maxim,
'Ya wanna eat, ya gotta work,' and at last I knew Pittsburgh.
                -- Winning sentence, 1987 Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest.

The only people for me are the mad ones -- the ones who are mad to live,
mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time,
the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn
like fabulous yellow Roman candles.
                -- Jack Kerouac, "On the Road"

The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what
you don't like, and do what you'd rather not.
                -- Mark Twain

        The Priest's grey nimbus in a niche where he dressed discreetly.
I will not sleep here tonight. Home also I cannot go.
        A voice, sweetened and sustained, called to him from the sea.
Turning the curve he waved his hand.  A sleek brown head, a seal's, far
out on the water, round.  Usurper.
                -- James Joyce, "Ulysses"

The Public is merely a multiplied "me."
                -- Mark Twain

The ripest fruit falls first.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Richard II"