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.

Disenfranchised

As you move up in income level you get more influence. When you get to the very top, and here the Occupy movement was a little misleading--it’s not one percent, it’s a tenth of a percent. When you get to the top tenth of a percent, where there’s a huge concentration of wealth, you can’t even talk about influence. They get what they want. That’s why the banks who created the crisis, often with criminal action, are not only scot-free, but richer, more powerful and bigger than ever.

~ Noam Chomsky ~

Poetry Friday

My role in society, or any artist's or poet's role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.

~ John Lennon ~

It Only Works If You Lose Both

I think winter wear is communal. You get some gloves and a scarf from a lost-and-found box, wash them, wear them for a while until you lose them. Then somebody else does the same thing.

~ Adrian Grenier ~
Photo by Spamily.

Ah, C'mon, Bill!

A food delivery bicycle is not an emergency vehicle.

~ Bill de Blasio ~

Snow!

Snow provokes responses that reach right back to childhood.

~ Andy Goldsworthy ~
Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Immortality

Immortality is a by-product of good work.

~ Mel Brooks ~




Photo by Towpilot courtesy Wikipedia.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

And as the dragon came out of the dungeon, following Johnnie and Tina into the bright gold and blue of their wedding day, he blinked his eyes as a cat does in the sunshine, and he shook himself, and the last of his plates dropped off, and his wings with them, and he was just like a very, very extra-sized cat. And from that day he grew furrier and furrier, and he was the beginning of all cats. Nothing of the dragon remained except the claws, which all cats have still, as you can easily ascertain.

And I hope you see now how important it is to feed your cat with bread and milk. If you were to let it have nothing to eat but mice and birds it might grow larger and fiercer, and scalier and tailier, and get wings and turn into the beginning of dragons.

~ Edith Nesbit from The Book of Dragons ~

Principles

Principles are like prayers--noble, of course, but rather awkward at a party.

~ Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham (played by Maggie Smith), Downton Abbey ~

Poetry Friday

That’s my hope, that my work is comforting. At its best, finally, poetry brings us comfort.

~ Susan Howe ~




Illustration courtesy openclipart.

Ice!

The noise resembles the roar of heavy, distant surf. Standing on the stirring ice one can imagine it is disturbed by the breathing and tossing of a mighty giant below.

~ Ernest Shackleton ~

Fall in Love With Reading

I fell in love with reading when I was allowed to choose whatever books I wanted to check out of the library. I was around nine years old when I began choosing my own books in earnest.

~ Adriana Trigiani ~

You Learn by Watching

When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, "no, I went to films."

~ Quentin Tarantino ~

Martin Luther King Day

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

~ Martin Luther King, Jr. ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

World's turned queer
somehow: all white,

no smell. Well, here
inside it's still familiar.
He'll go to sleep until
it puts itself right.

~ May Swenson from "Cat & the Weather" ~

You Look Terrific

When I see a woman who has lost weight, I say, "You look terrific."

When I see a woman who has quit dieting and embraced her curves, I say, "You look terrific."

When I see a woman who has obviously just had plastic surgery, I say, "You look terrific."

When I see a woman who has let her hair go grey and is hanging out at grocery store in her husband's sweatpants, I say, "You look terrific."

Because you know what? If you are woman and you managed to get up today and go outside, then you look terrific.

If you are still here, then you look terrific.

~ Elizabeth Gilbert ~

Poetry Friday

Poetry is the only history we have of human emotions. Most history books, what we call history books, are stories of battles and treaties, negotiations and beheadings and coronations. But poetry is the only reminder of this very essential part of being human, which is one’s emotional life and all the dimensions it entails.

~ Billy Collins ~
Image courtesy Scott Freiheit Wikimedia.

Some Books are Better Left Unfilmed

No one forces me, or any other writer, to sell a film option on the books. If you don't want to run the risk that the filmmakers may adapt your work in a way you don't like, then you don't sell the option. You know when you sell it that they will have to make some changes, just because film and TV are different media than books.

~ Jeff Abbott ~

On the Road to Nowhere

Every species becomes extinct; at some point, we will go extinct. The question is, as Homo sapiens, are we going to be able to adapt to the change that we're actually part of? We're causing such dramatic changes to the planet, so yes, you do stop and think, "I wonder where we're headed."

~ Louise Leakey ~

He'd Fit Right In Today!

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.

~ Mark Twain ~






Illustration courtesy Library of Congress.

Probably For Worse

For better or worse, zoos are how most people come to know big or exotic animals. Few will ever see wild penguins sledding downhill to sea on their bellies, giant pandas holding bamboo lollipops in China or tree porcupines in the Canadian Rockies, balled up like giant pine cones.

~ Diane Ackerman ~
Photo by Photocapy.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

The Chinese plate looked very blue,
And wailed, "Oh, dear! what shall we do!"
But the gingham dog and the calico cat
Wallowed this way and tumbled that,
     Employing every tooth and claw
     In the awfullest way you ever saw—
And, oh! how the gingham and calico flew!
          (Don’t fancy I exaggerate—
          I got my news from the Chinese plate!)

~ Eugene Field from "The Duel" ~

The image looks like a melding of the calico cat and the Chinese plate! Identifier: #D349A, photo courtesy Digital Library for the Decorative Arts and Material Culture, University of Wisconsin.

Same Old Song

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.

~ Willa Cather ~





Photograph by Carl Van Vechten, courtesy Library of Congress.

Poetry Friday

Art is long, and Time is fleeting...


~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ~
Image courtesy openclipart.

Beautiful Dreamer

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

~ Eleanor Roosevelt ~

Soup!

A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.

~ Abraham Maslow ~
Photo by Miia "Myrtti" Ranta, courtesy Wikimedia.

Or...Butter and Honey

Man cannot live by bread alone; he must have peanut butter.

~ James A. Garfield ~
Photo by Ross Burton.

Why Beer?

Let a man walk ten miles steadily on a hot summer's day along a dusty English road, and he will soon discover why beer was invented.

~ Gilbert K. Chesterton ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

A brand-spanking new episode of Henri!

Take the Plunge!

When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape--into different countries, mores, speech patterns--but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life's subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.

~ Julian Barnes ~

Poetry Friday

The artist in me cries out for design.

~ Robert Frost ~

Happy 2015!

Postcard courtesy Dave.

Slowly

Perfection is attained by slow degrees;
it requires the hand of time.

~ Voltaire ~





Illustration courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Abracadabra!

Words to me were magic. You could say a word and it could conjure up all kinds of images or feelings or a chilly sensation or whatever. It was amazing to me that words had this power.

~ Amy Tan ~

The Life of the Party!

The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you.

~ Frederick Buechner ~

Illustration courtesy openclipart.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

Every life should have nine cats.

~ Author unknown ~
Illustration by Louis Wain courtesy Library of Congress.

Laws and Freedom

Laws do not constrain freedom; they enable it. Look at civil rights. Without laws none of us are free.

~ Margot Livesey ~

Poetry Friday

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

~ Walt Whitman ~

Merry Christmas!

Spend all you have for loveliness,
Buy it and never count the cost;

~ Sara Teasdale from "Barter" ~

"Christmas Morning" by Henry Mosler, courtesy The Athenaeum.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

Walking on water? Ninja magnificence!

We Are the Frayers

If we think we have ours and don't owe any time or money or effort to help those left behind, then we are a part of the problem rather than the solution to the fraying social fabric that threatens all Americans.

~ Marian Wright Edelman ~

Poetry Friday

Oh who can tell the range of joy
Or set the bounds of beauty?

~ Sara Teasdale from "A Winter Bluejay" ~

Photo by Joseph Baranowski.