The Wish Remains...

I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves.

~ Mary Shelley ~

So Obvious!

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.

~ Albert Einstein ~







Photo by F. Schmutzer, courtesy Wikipedia.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

Her head is under the cat and
like the cat, she sleeps.

~ Susan Griffin from "The Perfect Mother" ~

Photo by Daveybot.

It's Probably Harder Today!

I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.

~ Isaac Newton ~

Poetry Friday

Who will guard over the fragile blossom of haiku poetry? Who will protect it in our own time against all that threatens it: societal indifference to poetry in general, materialism, a blindness to nature and our absolute inclusion in it, and, structurally, the heresy that "haiku" can be any utterance written in 5-7-5 syllables, or the recent disturbing trend of defining as haiku short, obtuse, experimental language games that only seem to proclaim the poet's cleverness for cleverness's sake? Who, indeed, will guard over haiku?

~ David Lanoue ~

Losing My Mind

I must be losing my mind. I forgot yesterday, and nearly forgot to post today! --KK

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.

~ Buddha ~

Houdini

Houdini connected to people on an emotional level so that when he would escape that straight jacket it wasn't about the straight jacket. It was about people looking at it and escaping poverty. When you have that it's the truest form of magic.

~ Criss Angel ~

Sage Advice

My advice to other disabled people would be, concentrate on things your disability doesn't prevent you doing well, and don't regret the things it interferes with. Don't be disabled in spirit as well as physically.

~ Stephen Hawking ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

The black kitten cries at her bowl
meek meek and the gray one glowers
from the windowsill. My hand on the can
to serve them. First day of spring.

~ Gail Mazur from "I Wish I Want I Need" ~

Photo by jambox998.

Communication

A writer writes not because he is educated, but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

~ Leo Rosten ~

Poetry Friday

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

~ Wallace Stevens ~




Photo from The Wallace Stevens Society website.

Do You Hear Yourself Living?

I would like to spend the rest of my days in a place so silent--and working at a pace so slow--that I would be able to hear myself living.

~ Elizabeth Gilbert from The Signature of All Things ~

Landscaping

All gardening is landscape painting.

~ William Kent ~
Image courtesy Wikipedia.

Series Books

The most difficult book I wrote was the fourth in a series of linked children's books. It was like pulling teeth because the publisher wanted exactly the same but completely different. I'd much rather just do something completely different, even if there's a risk of it going wrong.

~ Mark Haddon ~

Writers Learn From Their Own Books!

With every book, you go back to school. You become a student. You become an investigative reporter. You spend a little time learning what it's like to live in someone else's shoes.

~ John Irving ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

We

The single-most powerful word in our democracy is the word "we." We the People. We shall overcome. Yes we can. That word is owned by no one. It belongs to everyone.

~ Barack Obama ~

Poetry Friday

Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.

~ Plato ~

Happy Birthday, Jack Kerouac!

Something that you feel will find its own form.

~ Jack Kerouac ~
Photo courtesy Wikipedia.

Books

My favorite books are the ones that make me smile for hours after reading them. I want that for my readers, for the sweetness to linger. Sort of like chocolate, but without the calories.

~ Sarah Addison Allen ~

Indeed!

Courtesy PBS.

Maybe His Next Book Will Be a Cookbook

I have a lot of fans who are in the prison system, where ramen noodles are a kind of staple. Prisoners are always sending me recipes.

~ Chuck Palahniuk ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

There is one thing that cats don't like any better than men and women do, and that is to make fools of themselves.

~ Helen Hunt Jackson ~

You Go, Girl!

I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life, and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.

~ Georgia O'Keeffe ~
Photo by Alfred Stieglitz, courtesy Wikipedia.

Poetry Friday

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

~ Wallace Stevens ~
"Love" by Gustav Klimt, courtesy The Athenaeum.

A Little of This, A Little of That

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer ~

Records Broken

The globally averaged temperature over land and ocean surfaces for 2014 was the highest among all years since record keeping began in 1880. The December combined global land and ocean average surface temperature was also the highest on record.

~ NOAA ~

Spring!

Spring is nature's way of saying, "Let's party!"

~ Robin Williams ~

Don't Mess With Crows!

Given that crows have impressive memories, people who ruffle the feathers of these birds could experience years of retribution.

~ Jennifer Viegas ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

It is unclear which is larger, the number of dog lovers or the number of cat fanciers. There are as many great literary works about cats as there are about dogs, both Japanese and foreign.

As for haiku, however, my feeling is that cats are more popular than dogs as the themes of these short Japanese poems will show. Is that because the gestures and appearances of cats strongly stimulate the poetic sentiments of haiku composers?


~ From "Vox Populi, Vox Dei," The Asahi Shimbun ~



Print by Hiroshige Ando, courtesy Library of Congress.

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 ~