Poetry Friday

Poetically said of Georgia O'Keeffe:

She looks as if she had ridden the millions of miles of her every known imaginary horizon, and has left all her horses lying dead in their tracks.

~ Marsden Hartley ~

Doors...

The shelves were supposed to be loaded with books--but they were, of course, really doors: each book-lid opened as exciting as Alice putting her gold key in the lock. I spent days running in and out of other worlds like a time bandit, or a spy.

~ Caitlin Moran ~

Tornadoes

Tornadoes can also happen at any time of day or night, but most tornadoes occur between 4–9 p.m.

~ NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory ~
Photo courtesy NOAA NSSL.

Don't Forget...

Those who wish to pet and baby wild animals "love" them. But those who respect their natures and wish to let them live normal lives, love them more.

~ Edwin Way Teale ~
Photo by David Stokes.

Memorial Day Thought

What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.

~ Henry David Thoreau ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

~ From the The New National Reading Books. Infant Reader. (1885) ~

The Cult of Money

The worship of the golden calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly human goal.

~ Pope Francis ~

Poetry Friday

Keep a picture in your pocket
And a poem in your head
And you'll never feel lonely
At night when you're in bed.

~ Beatrice Schenk de Regniers from "Keep a Poem in Your Pocket" ~







Illustration by Maurice Sendak from The Giant Story by Beatrice Schenk de Regniers.

Comfort

When things are bad, we take comfort in the thought that they could always get worse. And when they are, we find hope in the thought that things are so bad they have to get better.

~ Malcolm Forbes ~

Yuck!

Poultry is like meat, except when you cook it rare. Then it's like bird-flavored Jello.

~ P. J. O'Rourke ~

Childbirth

Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.

~ Gloria Steinem ~

Goodbye Bernard Waber

Frequent family moves made me the perennial new kid on the block with no prospect of immediate friends, so books became my friends. I borrowed insatiably from various neighborhood branches of the Philadelphia library.

~ Bernard Waber ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

Lyle desperately wanted to win Loretta over. He tried flashing his sweetest, most toothsome smile at her to show how really friendly he was. But this only frightened the distrustful animal even more.

~ Bernard Waber from Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile ~
In memory of Bernard Waber who passed away on May 16.

Image courtesy threedonia.com.

Veggie Politics

The attorney general will not cast aspersions on my asparagus.

~ Louie Gohmert ~
Click here for video; quote at approximately 3:52.

Poetry Friday

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

~ Mark Strand ~

Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

And Work Together!

We need to harness the potential of our entrepreneurial spirit and our abundant clean energy resources to create a more sustainable future.

~ Michael Bennet ~
Image courtesy Open Clip Art Library.

Happy Birthday, L. Frank Baum!

Floating In His Tin Can

I'm really looking forward to it, if you can imagine floating weightless, watching the world pour by through the big bay window of the space station playing a guitar; just a tremendous place to think about where we are in history.

~ Chris Hadfield ~
Photo courtesy NASA.

Over the Rainbow

Before we had airplanes and astronauts, we really thought that there was an actual place beyond the clouds, somewhere over the rainbow. There was an actual place, and we could go above the clouds and find it there.

~ Barbara Walters ~
Photo by paparutzi.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

Cats are autocrats of naked self-interest. They are both amoral and immoral, consciously breaking rules. Their "evil" look at such times is no human projection: the cat may be the only animal who savors the perverse or reflects upon it.

~ Camille Paglia ~
Photo © Diane Mayr, all rights reserved.

Breathing Is Good

What art offers is space--a certain breathing room for the spirit.

~ John Updike ~
Photo by renedrivers.

Poetry Friday

Prose and Poetry

You can be immersed in good prose, like swimming in a lake on a warm summer afternoon.

In poetry
the ice-cold moon
drops down
into the lake,
melts
to surround you,
and then
together
you fly back home
to the sky.

~ Eve Merriam from The Singing Green: New and Selected Poems for All Seacons ~

Photo by chrismek.

Diabesity

One in four kids have either pre-diabetes or diabetes--what I like to call diabesity. How did this happen?

~ Mark Hyman ~
Photo by Greyhawk68.

A Sad Truth

Sometimes it can feel like the whole globe is spinning with irredeemable losses, capricious natural disasters and crimes so outrageously evil they dismantle any attempt to solve or explain them.

~ Karen Russell ~

Standardized Testing

...what started as a well motivated process to improve student learning has become an increasingly irrational high-stakes endeavor. Politicians may show short-term gains, but students, teachers, and the learning process are becoming casualties.

~ Howard Gardner ~

Today, It Appears That Education Is Losing

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

~ H. G. Wells ~



Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

It's a splotchy, blotchy
city cat, not pretty cat,
this rough little tough little bag of old bones.

~ Eve Merriam from "The Stray Cat" ~

Photo by vpickering.

Unleash the Artist in You!

Reading is an art form, and every man can be an artist.

~ Edwin Louis Cole ~
"Man Reading in a Park" (1914) by August Macke courtesy The Athenaeum.

Poetry Friday

Poetry should be like fireworks, packed carefully and artfully, ready to explode with unpredictable effects.

~ Lilian Moore ~
Photo by bayasaa.

With an Occasional Peek to See Where You Are Going

Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.

~ Theodore Roosevelt ~

Lovely!

Blossoms are scattered by the wind and the wind cares nothing, but the blossoms of the heart no wind can touch.

~ Yoshida Kenko ~
Photo ©Diane Mayr.

They're Both Beautiful In Their Own Way

Big doesn't necessarily mean better. Sunflowers aren't better than violets.

~ Edna Ferber ~