Clear the Clutter!

When we clear the physical clutter from our lives, we literally make way for inspiration and "good, orderly direction" to enter.

~ Julia Cameron ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

I'm running out of kat kwotes, but I'll never run out of cat videos!

Reality

Those who willingly reject reality should never have the chance to shape it.

~ Chad R. MacDonald ~

Poetry Friday

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

~ Charles Simic ~






Photo from NH Poetry Festival schedule.

Ha, Ha!

If people concentrated on the really important things in life, there'd be a shortage of fishing poles.

~ Doug Larson ~






Photo courtesy Internet Archive.

And, No Fear of Flying!

Visit a National Park Today!

Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.

~ Aldo Leopold ~
Photo Rocky Mountain National Park courtesy Library of Congress.

Music!

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.


~ Ludwig van Beethoven ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

The poem, "Cat!" by Eleanor Farjeon, can be found here.

Tell Your Story!

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.

~ Anne Lamott ~







"At the Writing Desk" by Frederick Childe Hassam, courtesy The Athenaeum.

Poetry Friday

The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day.

~ Samuel Beckett ~
"Creation of the World" by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, courtesy The Athenaeum.

Advice For Writers

Read, read, read. Read everything--trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

~ William Faulkner ~
Photo by Dr. John B. Padgett.

There's Always More

You don't reach points in life at which everything is sorted out for us. I believe in endings that should suggest our stories always continue.

~ Lauren Oliver ~

Keep Your Eyes Open!

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

~ Henry David Thoreau ~

Between

Graphic courtesy Good Book Scents.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

poking her nose
into thorny wild roses...
kitten
~ Issa, translated by David G. Lanoue ~

Photo by Ms. Barrows.

People Are Unique

Because people are unique and books are complex. No rating system is going to convey everything in a book. To do that you need to read the book and decide for yourself.

~ Kristin Pekoll ~







Photo courtesy Upper Arlington Archives.

Poetry Friday

The art of flying is the art of writing.

~ Juan Felipe Herrera ~

Happy Birthday, Mr. Hitchcock!

The Birds could be the most terrifying motion picture I have ever made.

~ Alfred Hitchcock ~

Remembrance

Grief starts to become indulgent, and it doesn't serve anyone, and it's painful. But if you transform it into remembrance, then you're magnifying the person you lost and also giving something of that person to other people, so they can experience something of that person.

~ Patti Smith ~

No One Said Life Was Fair

If life was fair, Elvis would be alive and all the impersonators would be dead.

~ Johnny Carson ~
Photo courtesy Wikipedia.

In the Smithsonian

I've got a portrait in the Smithsonian. Who ever thought that would happen?

~ Tommy Lasorda ~




Portrait by Everett Raymond Kinstler, courtesy National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

Narrow your eyelids to entreat the beast;
Make soft your glances; never show surprise
Discovering the lion in his eyes--

~ Elinor Wylie from "The Persian Kitten" ~

Illustration by John Tenniel.

Common Sense

Living in a pluralistic society that also grants freedom and civil rights protection to those with whom one disagrees is not the same as religious persecution. And crying persecution every time one doesn’t get one’s way is an insult to the very real religious persecution happening in the world today.

~ Rachel Held Evans ~

Poetry Friday

The book is part of the poem. Because you have little trees in the paper that are holding the poem up, and little rivers going through the paper, encouraging the poem to flow.

~ Juan Felipe Herrera ~





Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

And Yet, We Still Stockpile Them

The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.

~ J. Robert Oppenheimer ~

Happy Underwear Day!

From the cradle to the coffin underwear comes first.

~ Bertolt Brecht ~

Young People--Wake Up!

What's amazing is, if young people understood how doing well in school makes the rest of their life so much interesting, they would be more motivated. It's so far away in time that they can't appreciate what it means for their whole life.

~ Bill Gates ~

Please Don't Fail

Generosity has built America. When we fail to invest in children, we have to pay the cost.

~ Bob Keeshan ~


Photo courtesy Wikipedia.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

Her joy is like an instinct, joy
Of kitten, bird, or summer fly;

~ Dorothy Wordsworth from "The Mother's Return" ~

Illustration from An Alphabet of Animals, courtesy Internet Archive.

Ignorance Is Curable!

The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.

~ Albert Camus ~

Poetry Friday

I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.

~ Howard Nemerov ~
Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

No Matter How Small...

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.

~ Tennessee Williams ~
Photo by brewbooks, some rights reserved.

75 Years Old This Year!

The Preeminent Ballet

What War and Peace is to the novel and Hamlet is to the theater, Swan Lake is to ballet--that is, the name which to many people stands for and sums up an art form.

~ Robert Gottlieb ~
© The New York Public Library.

Who Doesn't Love Barbecue?

Revolutionaries eat too!

~ Bobby Seale ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

I have felt cats rubbing their faces against mine and touching my cheek with claws carefully sheathed. These things, to me, are expressions of love.

~ James Herriot ~
Photo by Luke-of-Kondor.

The Discussion

The entire discussion of race in America centers around the protection of White feelings.~ John Metta ~




Has anyone read Go Set a Watchman? The above statement is clearly supported by that book. Although I thought the book could have used a lot of editing, its discussion possibilities are endless. --KK

Poetry Friday

A commonplace book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that "great wits have short memories:" and whereas, on the other hand, poets, being liars by profession, ought to have good memories; to reconcile these, a book of this sort, is in the nature of a supplemental memory, or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day’s reading or conversation. There you enter not only your own original thoughts, (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant) but such of other men as you think fit to make your own, by entering them there.

~ Jonathan Swift from "A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet" ~

Love This!

He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.

~ P. G. Wodehouse ~

Sharks

Sharks are beautiful animals, and if you're lucky enough to see lots of them, that means that you're in a healthy ocean. You should be afraid if you are in the ocean and don't see sharks.

~ Sylvia Earle ~
Photo by Carol M. Highsmith, courtesy Library of Congress.

Read!

Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.

~ Oprah Winfrey ~

A Little Sun Ditty

Postcard courtesy NY Public Library Digital Collection.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade, without further introduction.

~ Mark Twain ~




Illustration by Mark Twain, courtesy Internet Archive.

Strong Enough

So maybe all the questions can boil down to this: Looking at a so-called Strong Female Character, would you—the writer, the director, the actor, the viewer—want to be her? Not want to prove you’re better than her, or to have her praise you or acknowledge your superiority. Action movies are all about wish-fulfillment. Does she fulfill any wishes for herself, rather than for other characters? When female characters are routinely "strong" enough to manage that, maybe they’ll make the "Strong Female Characters" term meaningful enough that it isn’t so often said sarcastically.

~ Tasha Robinson ~

Poetry Friday

Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.

~ Thomas Aquinas ~





Painting courtesy WikimediaCommons.

Art Is Crafts and Crafts is Art

But the very definition of art has been biased in that "art" was what men did in a European tradition and 'crafts' were what women and natives did. But it's actually all the same.

~ Gloria Steinem ~

It's Hoopla Day!

hoop·la
noun

1.
a: excited commotion









[The hoopla creates expectations that generally can't be met. We'll see... --KK]

Happy Birthday, Patrick Stewart!

I am not the archetypal leading man. This is mainly for one reason: as you may have noticed, I have no hair.

~ Patrick Stewart ~





Photo courtesy Patrick Stewart Network.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

Clipping courtesy Wellcome Images.

Outrageous, But Happening Nonetheless

I find it incredible and outrageous that public and school libraries are being forced to close--we'll all pay the price in the long term.

~ Anthony Browne ~

Poetry Friday

Simplicity is the glory of expression.

~ Walt Whitman ~







Walt Whitman cottage photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Happy Birthday, Tom Hanks!

A hero is somebody who voluntarily walks into the unknown.

~ Tom Hanks ~
Photo courtesy Wikipedia.

Oops! And Ice Cream

Oops, because I forgot to post a quote yesterday. In my case creeping senility has picked up the pace.

Today's quote:

My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.

~ Thornton Wilder ~
Photo courtesy NY Public Library Digital Collections.

It's Time We Started

We must learn to see the world anew.

~ Albert Einstein ~
This applies to almost everything creative and/or requiring thought! --KK

Photo, ISS043E256340 (05/26/2015) --- The crew of Expedition 43 on board the International Space Station took this Earth observation image of Australia that captures the imagination with its brilliant blues and rugged cliffs along the waters edge. The view is of northern Australia, along the eastern Gulf of Carpentaria in Queensland, courtesy NASA.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.

~ Martin Buber ~

Happy 4th of July!

...at the end of the day, we’re part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right.

~ Barack Obama ~



Illustration courtesy openclipart.org
.

Poetry Friday

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

~ Amy Lowell ~
Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Ya Think?

I shouldn't be saying this--high treason, really--but I sometimes wonder if Americans aren't fooled by our accent into detecting brilliance that may not really be there.

~ Stephen Fry ~

We, Too, Are Headed Toward Extinction

Just as fossil fuels from conventional sources are finite and are becoming depleted, those from difficult sources will also run out. If we put all our energy and resources into continued fossil fuel extraction, we will have lost an opportunity to have invested in renewable energy.

~ David Suzuki ~

Issues? Always!

With any tween, you have issues, from what they are going to wear to school, to how do you get them to speak politely, to how regularly they lose their contact lenses.

~ Marcia Gay Harden ~

Yes!

Our society spends a lot of money on prison bars. For the sake of our kids, let's invest in monkey bars.

~ Darell Hammond ~
Photo by Marjory Collins (1942), courtesy Library of Congress.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

The 10-pound, 6-ounce cat would become the nighttime warden at the Original L.A. Flower Market, making sure rodents and other vermin didn't get out of hand. He's part of a group of tough cats recruited by an animal rights nonprofit to find homes in places that could use their hard-scrabble qualities. Along with another cat named DeNiro, Pacino would prowl the Italian side of the flower market.

~ Jerome Campbell ~
Photo © Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times.

Tickled Pink...and Purple and Blue and Green and...

Poetry Friday

Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed. If a writer doesn't give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves, if he doesn't court disapproval, reproach and general wrath, whether of friends, family or party apparatchiks...the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth.

~ Michael Chabon ~

Curiosity

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.

~ Albert Einstein ~

Some Things You Just Gotta Do

Just as the bird sings or the butterfly soars, because it is his natural characteristic, so the artist works.

~ Alma Gluck ~