Good One!

Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet.

~ Chuck Palahniuk ~
Photo by t-bet.

Charming Gardeners

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

~ Marcel Proust ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

Hiddlety, diddlety, dumpty,
The cat ran up the plum tree;
Half-a-crown to fetch her down,
Hiddlety, diddlety, dumpty.

~ Nursery rhyme ~

Photo by coreycam.

Arbor Day Kwote--One Day Late

I wish people were all trees and I think I could enjoy them then.

~ Georgia O'Keeffe ~



Photo by Carl Van Vechten, courtesy Library of Congress.


[Note: O'Keeffe is standing next to a pile of firewood. I guess her idea of "enjoy" trees is to light them on fire! --KK]

Poetry Friday

Poetry humanizes us in a way that news, or even religion, has a harder time doing. A great Arab scholar, Dr. Salma Jayyusi, said, "If we read one another, we won't kill one another."
~ Naomi Shihab Nye ~
To start reading one another, pick up the anthology, The Space between Our Footsteps: Poems and Paintings from the Middle East, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye (Simon & Schuster, 1998).

Names

What's in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours.

~ James Joyce ~

Ha! Ha!

Coming September 2013, cover art courtesy StephenKing.com.

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.

~ Stephen King ~

St. George's Feast Day!

It is the eve of St. George's Day. Do you not know that tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway?

~ Bram Stoker from Dracula ~
Photo by David~O.

Moo!

The mere brute pleasure of reading--the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

~ Gilbert K. Chesterton ~
Photo by Anna Briggs.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

Oh, be honest, Tom cat, be honest, if only to yourself.

~ Mick Doyle from "The Adventures of a Tom Cat" ~
Illustration from Fun and Frolic edited by E. T. Roe.

Boston!

Boston may be your hometown, but we claim it, too. It’s one of America’s iconic cities. It’s one of the world’s great cities. And one of the reasons the world knows Boston so well is that Boston opens its heart to the world.

~ Barack Obama ~

Poetry Friday

Well, I think maybe people who write poetry are different in their thinking, to begin with, and how they translate what they experience into writing or maybe what they experience is somewhat different from what others do.

~ Lisel Mueller ~

How About Natural?

The clue to book jacket photography is to look friendly and approachable, but not too glamorous.

~ Antonia Fraser ~

Nonfiction

All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them.

~ Richard Hughes ~

Much Better!

Better than a thousand hollow words, is one word that brings peace.

~ Buddha ~
Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Poison Ivy

"Poison Ivy," written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller

Sunday's Kat Kwote

It may be remarked just here that the cat, although a passionate lover, is both modest and subtle. Dogs conduct their amours with little regard for public decency but a cat makes love at night in shady groves, sanctified by the natural odours of the warm earth, or in the hidden recesses of gabled roofs.

~ Carl Van Vechten ~
Photo by mahalis.greece.

Sometimes You Just Have to Watch This Stuff

This is a Brene Brown video. There's any number of good quotes in here, one of the ones I like the best is, "We numb vulnerability...the problem is that, and I learned this from the research, you cannot selectively numb emotion."

Poetry Friday

A final suggestion about bringing poetry into your lives: don't analyze it, don't ask others to analyze it. Don't deconstruct it or try to make meaning of it. Find the poems that wake you up, that make you feel as if you've submerged yourself in a mineral hot spring or an ice bath; find the poems that make you feel (almost) irrational joy or sadness or delight. Find the poems that make you want to roll around in them or paint their colors all over your bedroom ceiling. Those are the poems you want to play with--forget the ones that don't make sense. Find those poems that communicate with the deepest parts of your being and welcome them in.

~ Elena Aguilar ~

Consider Yourself Warned!

Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.

~ Saul Bellow ~

What You Learn by Swimming Upstream

The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.

~ Woodrow Wilson ~

Much Too Busy

...we're too busy singin' to put anybody down.

~ Monkees' theme song ~

One More Reason, Beside Downton Abbey, to Support PBS

You will still find more hours of in-depth news programming, investigative journalism and analysis on PBS than on any other outlet.

~ Gwen Ifill ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

The cat's a shadow-cat, an edgeless blur.

~ Ciaran O'Driscoll from "The Shadow Cat" ~
Photo by Max xx.

But, It Doesn't Mean You Have to Exercise That Right

In America you have a right to be stupid--if you want to be.

~ John Kerry ~

Poetry Friday

Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.

~ André Gide ~
What's not to love about this if you're a writer? It means you'll always have a job, and you're free to "borrow" from others! --KK

Knitting

It's like a woman's birthright to knit. It's primal. It's timeless. You don't need electricity to knit. You can do it with a candle, girls!

~ Tracey Ullman ~
Print by Mary Cassatt courtesy Library of Congress.

You Can't Have One Without the Other

To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.

~ Wendell Berry ~

Art

Art is pattern informed by sensibility.

~ Herbert Read ~
"Hat Shop" by August Macke (1914), courtesy The Athenaeum.

Poet As Prognosticator

Opening of the baseball season: New York vs. Boston, c 1886

I see great things in baseball. It's our game--the American game.

~ Walt Whitman ~
Photo courtesy Library of Congress.