"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." What famous saying or quote or verse from a song or poem reflects how you feel these days?

“Call me Ishmael.” ― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“Old Charlie stole the handle, and the train it won’t stop going, no way to slow down”
Locomotive Breath, Jethro Tull.

“Hope is the thing with feathers. “ Emily Dickinson

“It is, what it is.”
Some poor bastard, I assume.

“We’re too young to reason, too grown up to dream” – Bryan Ferry, Slave to Love

I have to travel quite far to the east and a long time ago to find the lines that for many years have described most perfectly how I feel about my time in the world. Oddly, the words are in a language I do not know and the translations I have seen differ and are imperfect.

The words are from a very famous Chinese poem called Jinse, or the ornamented zither. The beauty of the poem survives translation as does its mood of delicate melancholy. The last two lines of the poem are:

“Such feelings I might recall to my mind,

Only at the time I was already confused.”

For “confused” you might read “disappointed” or maybe “detached” which tells you the impossibility of translation and how hopelessly presumptuous it is even to try. Nevertheless here it is, though the last two lines on their own are almost meaningless.

Rolling Stones: You can’t always get what you want

When I need a chuckle, I think about a line from the Red Elvises’ Rocketman

My spaceship is clean, and I love my job.

It exactly captures taking pride in something for which both the pride and the something can’t really be shared with other people, partially because it’s not conventional.

“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
,
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

-T.S. Eliot (excerpt from The Wasteland)

”((Come in under the shadow of this red rock),”

Goes where the blank line is, sorry for the screwup

@gorillapaws I love TS Eliot.

“There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like this in his stretch. From the first clang of the rail to the last clang of the rail. Three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days. Three extra days were for leap years.” One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

“Don’t ever let go….Try to let go”
...Steven Wilson from the song Routine