Behold the View

Climb the mountain not to plant your flag, but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air and behold the view. Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.

~ David McCullough ~

Poetry Friday

As to the pure mind all things are pure, so to the poetic mind all things are poetical.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ~







Photogravure courtesy Library of Congress.

Discoveries

The very nature of science is discoveries, and the best of those discoveries are the ones you don't expect.

~ Neil deGrasse Tyson ~





Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Pets

Pets don't do the human things of guilt and anger and recrimination that we do. They come and go with great acceptance.

~ Jon Katz ~

Birds

It is not only fine feathers that make fine birds.

~ Aesop ~
Illustration from Three Hundred Aesop's Fables.

Me, Neither!

I can't picture going to a beach, or anywhere on vacation, without a couple of books as companions.

~ Rosecrans Baldwin ~
Illustration courtesy openclipart.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

In the long run even a dog will compromise with the cat.

~ Hungarian proverb ~
Photo by Leslie Jones, courtesy Boston Public Library.

Words from a Bibliophile

There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers--there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.

~ Julian Barnes~

Poetry Friday

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

~ Philip Levine ~

Wild Animals

Wild animals would not stay in a country where there were so many people. Pa did not like to stay, either. He liked a country where the wild animals lived without being afraid.

~ Laura Ingalls Wilder ~




Photo courtesy Wikimedia.

Museums

Outside museums, in noisy public squares, people look at people. Inside museums, we leave that realm and enter what might be called the group-mind, getting quiet to look at art.

~ Jerry Saltz ~
Print courtesy NYPL Digital Gallery.

Winter

Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.

~ Willa Cather ~
Cather is buried here in NH, so she should know!

Happy Birthday George!

If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.

~ George Washington ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

As a child I parleyed with animals, stuffed and real.
Making my kitten pilot of a boot, I guided
from one end of a string the dizzy flight and collapse.

~ Carol Frost from "The Fearful Child" ~






Painting by Suzanne Valadon, courtesy The Athenaeum.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Vintage Valentine courtesy Dave.

Poetry Friday

In poetry you can express almost inexpressible feelings. You can express the pain of loss, you can express love. People always turn to poetry when someone they love dies, when they fall in love.

~ Erica Jong ~


Illustration courtesy openclipart.

And Sometimes They Work Together

Visual art and writing don't exist on an aesthetic hierarchy that positions one above the other, because each is capable of things the other can't do at all. Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating.

~ William S. Burroughs ~

Bicycles

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.

~ Christopher Morley ~

Snow!

One of the very best reasons for having children is to be reminded of the incomparable joys of a snow day.

~ Susan Orlean ~
Photo by Jack Delano (1940), courtesy Library of Congress.

Like Cherries Jubilee

You can't serve up hearts like cherries jubilee.

~ Leonard Bailey ~
[Interesting quote! I thought it a rather appropriate quote for Valentine's Day week, until I looked up Leonard Bailey. It seems that Leonard Bailey is a heart surgeon famous for infant heart transplants! Gives a whole 'nother meaning to the quote, doesn't it?]

Photo courtesy CBC (also includes a recipe).

Sunday's Kat Kwote

The breeze and the dawn
will flourish again
when you return,
as if beneath your step.
Between flowers and sills
the cats will know.

~ Cesare Pavese from "The Cats Will Know" ~

"Edith with Lierre" by Lilla Cabot Perry, courtesy The Athenaeum.

Do More by Doing Less

Fear less, hope more; eat less, chew more; whine less, breathe more; talk less, say more; love more, and all good things will be yours.

~ Swedish proverb ~

Poetry Friday

Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.


~ Jack Kerouac ~

Photo by Diamondmagna, courtesy Wikimedia.

Happy Birthday, Hank Aaron!

I never doubted my ability, but when you hear all your life you're inferior, it makes you wonder if the other guys have something you've never seen before. If they do, I'm still looking for it.

~ Hank Aaron ~

Television

Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.

~ T. S. Eliot ~




Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Requires Supreme Art of Common Sense

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

~ Sun Tzu ~




Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

What Is Your Closet Celebrating?

Your closet needs to be a place of joy and celebration of who are you now--not who you were.

~ Stacy London ~
I couldn't resist this illustration of a closet! It's from a 1884 children's book, courtesy NYPL Digital Library.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

It doesn't do to be sentimental about cats; the best ones don't respect you for it.

~ Susan Howatch ~





Painting by Suzanne Valadon (1919), courtesy The Athenaeum.