Pieces of String Too Short to Save

 --- via Susan Tonkin, who made a reference to "a box for pieces of string too short to save."

I found a couple of references in US usage (Donald Lipski's show, Bob Chancellor's memoir, Dull Men's Club) but I assume it occurs in the UK, too.

What gods do is not different from what they are. They know little hesitation and less regret.

 --- Michael Kinnucan, in "The Gods Show Up," Hypocrite Reader, Issue 29, "Faces and Masks," June 2013

Excerpts

The Greeks celebrated the rites of Dionysos before a pillar wrapped in ivy on which hung a mask. The mask was the god. Why a mask?

A mask hides a face, evidently—but it is not a disguise. After all, a disguise can’t appear as a disguise; it has to look like the real thing. But a mask announces itself quite clearly, rigid, closed, nothing like a face. A face can reveal (even betray) the mind “behind” it because faces are mutable, responsive: a face can blush or grow pale, its gaze can falter, its jaw can set. The face is legible in terms of what it discloses or fails to, what it never fully gives but constantly suggests. A mask is immutable, staring, implacable; there is “nothing” behind it to read. . . . 

The revelatory force of the mask is what makes it a worthy home for Dionysos. To understand why, we must take a moment to consider what made the Greek gods divine. After two thousand years of Christianity it’s hard to imagine divinity apart from unity, eternity, singularity, commandment; it’s hard to see why the difference between Zeus and any other adulterous husband isn’t merely a matter of degree. But the Greeks saw an absolute difference between mortals and gods, a difference which might be formulated this way: mortals are partial and complex, gods are complete and simple. A god’s desires are implacable and brook no appeal, while a human’s are changeable and often disappointed; a god’s actions always go to the absolute limit and can’t be undone, while a human’s are always in a certain sense incomplete, half-assed. Zeus ravishes Leda, who bears Helen the all-too-beautiful, and Troy falls, and almost everyone touched by Helen dies a bad death; the question “what if Zeus hadn’t ravished Leda?” is not one that can be asked of a god. What gods do is not different from what they are. They know little hesitation and less regret. According to Euripides, they are “forbidden” to cry.