Anyone know any good first-hand accounts of physical rehab? I could use them for something I'm writing.

A strange story for fans of "The Master and Margarita": [link]

Thanks for the link, Ginger. That makes me kind of sad and boggled.

Religious fanatics vs. art again. Oy vey.

Speaking of religion and books this interview with Karen Armstrong is fascinating.

Didn't a lot of people say God is beyond language? We could only experience the glimmer of God.

That's what the Buddha said. You can't define nirvana, you can't say what it is. The Buddha also said you could craft a new kind of human being in touch with transcendence. He was once asked by a Brahman priest who passed him in contemplation and was absolutely mesmerized by this man sitting in utter serenity. He said, "Are you a god, sir? Are you an angel or a spirit?" And the Buddha said, "No, I'm awake." His disciplined lifestyle had activated parts of his humanity that ordinarily lie dormant. But anybody could do it if they trained hard enough. The Buddhists and the Confucians and the greatest monotheistic mystics did with their minds and hearts what gymnasts and dancers do with their bodies.

You're saying these ancient sages really didn't care about big metaphysical systems. They didn't care about theology.

No, none of them did. And neither did Jesus. Jesus did not spend a great deal of time discoursing about the trinity or original sin or the incarnation, which have preoccupied later Christians. He went around doing good and being compassionate. In the Quran, metaphysical speculation is regarded as self-indulgent guesswork. And it makes people, the Quran says, quarrelsome and stupidly sectarian. You can't prove these things one way or the other, so why quarrel about it? The Taoists said this kind of speculation where people pompously hold forth about their opinions was egotism. And when you're faced with the ineffable and the indescribable, they would say it's belittling to cut it down to size. Sometimes, I think the way monotheists talk about God is unreligious.

Heh. I'm watching an old Bones and DB just went on a riff about adjectives v adverbs ending in "ly".

Can I beg some research assistance? I am trying to track down an association I picked up someplace, involving the phrase "The Devil is sweet." I think it is related to Biblical metaphor, but I can't quite place it.

(The only Biblical hit that seems anywhere appropriate is Proverbs 27:7, about how to a starving soul even the bitter honeycomb may taste sweet.)

No thanks to Google, I know I am not looking for the song by Ayatollah nor the lyrics by Laura Nyro. Anybody got a secret Boolean idea, or the right variation on the concept of devil, that would help me out?

Google tells me that Stephen King wrote, "The devil's voice is sweet to hear." Perusing several actual quotation books under "devil" and "sweet" got me nothing except a lot of really cool quotes about the devil that are not relevant to your search.

I tried googling in French, which turned up nothing of note.

I suspect that King is picking it up from the Grateful Dead, who seem to have had a song by that title as well.

Please do post any really cool devilicious quotes, in French or English (or Latin!) as you desire.