Poetry Friday

Poems are other people’s snapshots in which we see our own lives.

~ Charles Simic ~
Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, courtesy Library of Congress.

Music

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

~ Victor Hugo ~
[Do you think he ever envisioned Les Miserables, the musical? --KK]

Engraving by Émile Bayard (1886).

What Would the Search Term Be?

Bella Swan: Are you going to tell me how you stopped the van?

Edward Cullen: Yeah. Um... I had an adrenaline rush. It's very common. You can Google it.

And the Dog, Too?

Every Time!

Sunday's Kat Kwote

But thousands die without or this or that,
Die, and endow a college or a cat.

~ Alexander Pope ~



Photo by pixn8tr.

Hospitals of the Soul

A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold, rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen, instead.

~ Caitlin Moran ~
Moran's home library, Warstones Branch Library, photo by Richard Law courtesy geograph.org.

Poetry Friday

Th' unfinish'd Poet budded forth too soon,
For what the Morning warm'd; was scorch'd at Noon.

~ Samuel Cobb ~
[Or as the old expression goes, "haste makes waste." --KK]

Photo by Camera John.

Count Your Blessings, Dear Readers

A big part of the problem is the severe degree of poverty for our nation's children. According to UNICEF, among industrialized countries only Romania has a higher child poverty rate than the United States. Just in the last 10 years the number of impoverished American children increased by 30 percent.

~ Paul Bucheit ~

Sometimes You Just Need to Gulp

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring.

~ Raymond Chandler ~

Dancing Notes!

The ballet embodies the notes of music. And sometimes you almost feel like you can see the notes dance up there on the stage.

~ Robert Caro ~
Chassee diagram from Orchesography by John Weaver, published in 1706.

Dolphins

Dolphins are animals of good omen. It made me happy to have them swimming around the canoe, and though my hands had begun to bleed from the chafing of the paddle, just watching them made me forget the pain. I was very lonely before they appeared, but now I felt that I had friends with me and did not feel the same.

~ Scott O'Dell from Island of the Blue Dolphins ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

Cats refuse to wear sporting apparel.

~ Dr. Sheldon Cooper ~




They're not all that interested in sports--only as a platform to attain a higher goal. --KK

Photo © Diane Mayr, all rights reserved.

She Could See Despite Her Limitations

Courtesy MoveOn.

Poetry Friday

An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

~ Charles Bukowski ~

A Truism

We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.

~ David Mamet ~
Photo by She's Not There.

Let's Keep Singing and Dancing!

But I feel music has a very important role in ritual activity, and that being able to join in musical activity, along with dancing, could have been necessary at a very early stage of human culture.

~ E. O. Wilson ~

Dip Your Brush!

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

~ Henry Ward Beecher ~
Joseph Turner, "War, the Exile and the Rock Limpet," Tate Gallery, London, courtesy Web Gallery of Art.

Day is Done

Day is done, gone the sun,
From the lake, from the hills, from the sky;
All is well, safely rest, God is nigh.

~ Unknown ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

The quote comes at the end of the video. --KK

It Always Comes Back to Education

If the new generation is not given pens they will be given guns by the terrorists.

~ Malala Yousafzai ~

Photo courtesy Mohsin Ali.

Poetry Friday

I liked the portable, comfortable shape of poems. I liked the space around them and the way you could hold your words at arm’s length and look at them. And especially the way they took you to a deeper, quieter place, almost immediately.

~ Naomi Shihab Nye ~

And They'd Be Right!

I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.

~ John Steinbeck ~
Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Book Reviews

The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.

~ William Faulkner ~


Photo by Carl Van Vechten courtesy Library of Congress.

Prove This Statement To Be Wrong--Vote!

The largest party in America, by the way, is neither the Democrats nor the Republicans. It's the party of non-voters.

~ Robert Reich ~
Photo taken on voting day, November 2008, © Diane Mayr, all rights reserved.

The Crux of the Presidential Election

Those who are careless with the truth in smaller matters can never be trusted with important matters.

~ Albert Einstein ~



Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

For while in every other part
      His portly person sleeps,
That bushy tail, with steady wave,
      A ceaseless vigil keeps.


~ R. Worthington, "Don't You Like My Cat?" from Baby Chatterbox ~



Photo © Diane Mayr, all rights reserved.

We Don't Need a Salesman!

The whole purpose of a campaign is to tell the American people who you are and what you want to do as president, not to hide your policies behind a smoke-screen of counterfeit empathy and deceptive advertising and hope they won’t notice them until you’re elected.

That’s not leadership, it’s salesmanship.

~ Steve Almond ~

Poetry Friday

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.

~ Jane Hirshfield ~

Image courtesy Open Clip Art Library.

Zombies

Zombies are the blue-collar monsters.

~ George A. Romero ~



Image courtesy Open Clip Art Library.

Happy Halloween!

Witch and ghost make merry on this last of dear October’s days.

~ Anonymous ~
Image courtesy Open Clip Art Library.

Language

Language was important, sexy, fun, alive, extremely personal, it was like food, you wouldn't just pop anything into your mouth, why would you let anything pop out that hadn't been considered and prepared for someone to enjoy?

~ Jeanne Darst from Fiction Ruined My Family ~

Hurricanes

One thing that does seem clear is that warmer oceans (a la global warming) mean more evaporation, and that likely leads to storms with more and more dangerous rainfall of the kind we saw with Hurricane Irene last year. In addition, a paper published just last month, used records of storm surges going back to 1923 as a measure of hurricane activity. A strong correlation between warm years and strong hurricanes was seen. Thus if you warm the planet, you can expect more dangerous storms.

~ Adam Frank ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

Myself and Pangur, cat and sage
Go each about our business;
I harass my beloved page,
He his mouse.

~ Eavan Boland, "From the Irish of Pangur Ban" ~

Welcome, Julian!

Father asked us what was God's noblest work. Anna said men, but I said babies. Men are often bad, but babies never are.

~ Louisa May Alcott ~

Poetry Friday

I sometimes like to tinker with poems that have failed, ones that I have sent aside. Even years afterward, I will revisit them if there is something about them that I cannot give up on.

~ John Barton ~

Interesting Thought

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

~ Anita Brookner ~

It Didn't Stop Her From Becoming a Writer

I dropped chemistry. I practically blew up the lab in college.

~ Patricia Cornwell ~

Old New Hampshire

Old New Hampshire, Old New Hampshire
Old New Hampshire Grand and Great
We will sing of Old New Hampshire,
Of the dear old Granite State.

~ Refrain from NH Offical State Song, "Old New Hampshire" ~

Postcard courtesy Boston Public Library.

To Be a Writer You Have to Read!

I started to read books when I was a child. This triggered my strong interest in literature after reading more and more books. I felt I had many words to express, I thought the strongest and most unconstrained way was through literature, so I started to write. Of course, I also had a desire to prove myself, and a wish to change my destiny.

~ Mo Yan ~
Photo © J. Kolfhaus, courtesy NobelPrize.org.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

A Thousand years or so before Christ the Egyptians associated the cat with music, utilizing the graceful head and figure of the beloved animal in the decoration of the sistra.

~ Carl Van Vechten ~

This Makes a Lot of Sense

The nation exists to make lives better for all its people--making sure that corporations treat their workers as assets to be developed rather than as costs to be cut. Companies have been slow to create jobs not because of insufficient profits but because of inadequate customers. The vast American middle class are the real job creators, but they don’t have enough money in their pockets because too many companies have broken the basic bargain linking wages to productivity.

~ Robert Reich ~

Poetry Friday

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

~ Lucille Clifton ~


Photo © Dorothy Alexander.

And It Keeps You Warm, Too!

We hold the values of freedom and human rights very high and I think that those are all a part of a very strong quilt that binds us together.

~ Robert Menendez ~


Photo by circulating.

This Is Applicable to So Much!

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

~ Ernest Hemingway ~

Work Out!

There's no reason to stereotype yourself. Doing math is like going to the gym--it's a workout for your brain and it makes you smarter.

~ Danica McKellar ~

The Good Stuff

I'm not after fame and success and fortune and power. It's mostly that I want to have a good job and have good friends; that's the good stuff in life.

~ Drew Barrymore ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

Cats can be cruel and stingy and aloof (although most cats are far less aloof than has generally been supposed). And all of them are half insane.

~ Michael Robbins ~
Photo by jennratonmort.

Defining the Terms

A Radical is a man with both feet firmly planted--in the air. A Conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. A Reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards. A Liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest--at the command--of his head.

~ Franklin D. Roosevelt ~

Poetry Friday

The secret of all art, also of poetry, is, thus, distance. Thanks to distance the past preserved in our memory is purified and embellished.

~ Czeslaw Milosz ~

Me, Too!

The more I live, the more I think that humor is the saving sense.

~ Jacob August Riis ~




Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

A Great Matter

Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is a great matter. Art is an organ of human life, transmitting man’s reasonable perception into feeling.

~ Leo Tolstoy ~





"Portrait of a Young Married Couple" by Jacob Jordaens courtesy Museum of Fine Arts.

An Old Fashioned Birthday Wish

Card courtesy New York Public Library Digital Gallery. Click on the image for a larger view.

Columbus Day

Tomorrow morning before we depart, I intend to land and see what can be found in the neighborhood.

~ Christopher Columbus ~
Map courtesy New York Public Library Digital Gallery.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

...it is much easier to train a cat to perform tasks that have some ancestral meaning for their niche in the environment than those which are abstract or meaningless from their point of view. Cats, in other words, are much smarter than they let on.

~ Stephen Budiansky ~


Photo by carolyn.will.

Common Sense and Courage

Most of man's problems upon this planet, in the long history of the race, have been met and solved either partially or as a whole by experiment based on common sense and carried out with courage.

~ Frances Perkins ~

Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Poetry Friday

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

~ William Faulkner ~

Play

You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.

~ Plato ~
Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

True Love

True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.

~ Francois de La Rochefoucauld ~

What An Achievement!

The fastest time to enter a zipped suitcase is 5.43 seconds achieved by Leslie Tipton (USA) on 14 September 2009 in New York, USA on the LIVE! with Regis & Kelly show.

~ Courtesy Socialphy ~

A Most Extreme Form of Censorship

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

~ Ray Bradbury ~


Photo by Samuel M. Livingston.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

Master Cat, who still kept in advance of the party, came up to some reapers, and said to them, "You, good people, who are reaping, if you do not say that all this corn belongs to my Lord the Marquis of Carabas, you shall all be cut into pieces as small as minced meat."

~ Charles Perrault from "Master Cat; or, Puss in Boots"~

Neil Armstrong

I guess we'd all like to be remembered not for one great firework, but for the ledger of our daily work.

~ Neil Armstrong ~

Photo courtesy NASA.

Poetry Friday

The subjects choose me. Whatever tickles my fancy or bangs my funny bone I approach with vim and vigor, or vice versa.

~ Douglas Florian ~

Mystery

Mystery magnifies danger, as a fog the sun.

~ Charles Caleb Colton ~





Graphic courtesy Open Clip Art Library.

Even More True Today!

Why waste your money looking up your family tree? Just go into politics and your opponents will do it for you. ~ Mark Twain ~

Never Forget!

When a society or a civilization perishes, one condition can always be found. They forgot where they came from.

~ Carl Sandburg ~





Photo courtesy National Park Service.

Interesting Technique

Please understand the reason why Chinese vegetables taste so good. It is simple. The Chinese do not cook them, they just threaten them!

~ Jeff Smith ~

Photo by sanfamedia.com.