Poetry Friday

It is as good an hour for song and dance as any other, and I will make a tune for a sunny May evening, and you shall sway among the grasses like any flower on the bough.

~ Eleanor Farjeon from Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard ~

Applause!

I take people on a musical journey while getting kicks myself and I’m loving it! When you get that reaction from the audience, it’s like a bloody drug. That’s the drug I’ve indulged in the most: applause. I can’t sit around the house as there’s no adulation to be had!

~ Tom Jones ~
Photo by cyberdees

Clamor of Tracks

True solitude is a din of birdsong, seething leaves, whirling colors, or a clamor of tracks in the snow.

~ Edward Hoagland ~


Photo by herzogbr

Famous Last Words...

Now run along and play, but don't get into trouble...

~ H.A. Rey from Curious George ~

Blizzard!

Blizzard

Origin:
1820–30, Americanism; earlier: violent blow, shot; cf. Brit. dial. (Midlands) blizzer, blizzom blaze, flash, anything that blinds momentarily; prob. expressive formations with components of blast, blaze, bluster, etc.

~ Dictionary.com ~

Photo by dalboz17

Sunday's Kat Kwote

Slowly, slowly,
You rise and stretch
In a glossiness of beautiful curves

~ Amy Lowell from "To Winky" ~





Photo by Martin Cathrae

Merry Christmas!

There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.

~ Erma Bombeck ~

Poetry Friday

I also dance on stilts...
~ Martin Steingesser ~
Photo by -foxhusky-

...Deep Thinking

But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance.

~ Diane Johnson ~

Self Knowledge

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.

~ Benjamin Franklin ~

Have Yourself a Tacky Little Christmas!

There is a remarkable breakdown of taste and intelligence at Christmastime.

~ P.J. O'Rourke ~

Photo by Sterin

A Christmas Test

I've learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he/she handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.

~ Maya Angelou ~


Photo by shoothead

Sunday's Kat Kwote

Keep your whiskers crisp and clean.

                  ~ Nancy Willard ~



Photo by Picture Zealot

Make Music!

To me the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make.

~ Truman Capote ~

Poetry Friday

Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
~ Gustave Flaubert ~

Give a Child a Book This Season

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.

~ Marcel Proust ~

Let It Shine!

So you treat your love like a firefly, like it only gets to shine for a little while.

Catch it in a mason jar, with holes in the top, and run like hell to show it off.


~ Miranda Lambert from "Me and Charlie Talking" ~

Photo by B Rosen

Sewing: A Metaphor for Life

Take your needle, my child, and work at your pattern; it will come out a rose by and by. Life is like that--one stitch at a time taken patiently and the pattern will come out all right like the embroidery.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes ~

It's Coming...

Be merry all, be merry all,
With holly dress the festive hall;
Prepare the song, the feast, the ball,
To welcome merry Christmas.

~ William Robert Spencer ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

Joy and Love will both be yours,
   Minnow, don't be glum.
Happy days are coming soon--
   Sleep and let them come...

~ Elizabeth Bishop from "Lullaby for the Cat" ~






Photo by hilali

There's the Rub...

~ Scottish proverb ~
Photo by Today Is a Good Day

Poetry Friday

Fortunately I remember pretty well what I used to like to read, think about, and do. I find, even today, that if I write something I like, children are pretty apt to like it too. I guess what it amounts to is that I never grew up.

~ Aileen Fisher ~

They Don't?

Educational television should be absolutely forbidden. It can only lead to unreasonable disappointment when your child discovers that the letters of the alphabet do not leap up out of books and dance around with royal-blue chickens.

~ Fran Lebowitz ~
Photo by esti-

Sounds Like a Plan!

Let's get away from sleigh bells, let's get away from snow
Let's make a break some Christmas, Dear, I know the place to go
How'd ya like to spend Christmas on Christmas Island?

~ Lyle Moraine from "Christmas Island" originally recorded by The Andrew Sisters ~

Comic Book Empowerment

It’s a natural human reaction to dream of what it would be to being empowered, to be able to solve things that you can’t otherwise.

~ Paul Levitz ~

A Gentle Spirit

I place a high moral value on the way people behave. I find it repellent to have a lot, and to behave with anything other than courtesy in the old sense of the word--politeness of the heart, a gentleness of the spirit.

~ Emma Thompson ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

Cruel, but composed and bland,
Dumb, inscrutable and grand,
So Tiberius might have sat,
Had Tiberius been a cat.

~ Matthew Arnold ~

Photo by JKönig

The Important Stuff

Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.

~ Robert Motherwell ~



Photo courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum

Poetry Friday

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.

~ Robert Frost ~



I hope it's not fatal! --KK

Photo by Elizabeth Thomsen

Shopping

Image courtesy melvdesigns

At the Ministry of Stories

You'll be able to find the Ministry of Stories through a secret door inside the first shop in the world to supply the daily needs of monsters of all shapes and sizes.

~ Nick Hornby ~
Photo courtesy Ministry of Stories

R.I.P. Leslie Nielsen

Dr. Rumack (Leslie Nielsen): Can you fly this plane, and land it?

Ted Striker (Robert Hays): Surely you can't be serious.

Dr. Rumack: I am serious... and don't call me Shirley.

~ from the film Airplane! ~

Science

Overall, the key criterion of science is that it provide a clear, rational, and succinct account of a pattern in nature.

~ from the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks ~





WPA poster by Shari Weisberg courtesy Library of Congress

Sunday's Kat Kwote

The white saucer like some full moon descends
       At last from the clouds of the table above;
She sighs and dreams and thrills and glows,
       Transfigured with love.

~ Harold Monro from "Milk for the Cat" ~

Photo by tillwe

Shopping Season

If you think the United States has stood still, who built the largest shopping center in the world?

~ Richard M. Nixon ~
Photo by jpellgen

Poetry Friday

The pleasure a writer knows is the pleasure all sages enjoy. Out of non-being, being is born; out of silence, the writer produces a song. Laughing winds lift up the metaphor; clouds rise from a forest of writing brushes.

~ Sam Hamill ~

On the Plymouth Rock

Hear me, I beseech you; get up an auction and sell Plymouth Rock! The Pilgrims were a simple and ignorant race. They never had seen any good rocks before, or at least any that were not watched, and so they were excusable for hopping ashore in frantic delight and clapping an iron fence around this one. But you, gentlemen, are educated; you are enlightened; you know that in the rich land of your nativity, opulent New England, overflowing with rocks, this one isn't worth, at the outside, more than thirty-five cents. Therefore, sell it, before it is injured by exposure, or at least throw it open to the patent-medicine advertisements, and let it earn its taxes.

~ Mark Twain ~

Engraving by Joseph Andrews courtesy Library of Congress

Remember This...

...an humble mind is the soil out of which thanks naturally grow.

~ Henry Ward Beecher ~

Photo by Sharlee H

Simple Math

Nature has given men one tongue and two ears, that we may hear twice as much as we speak.

~ Epictetus ~

I Kid You Not!

Roadkill is an alternative designer toy boutique, creating original toy characters. We make toys with a twist. Toys as dark as the inside of a goth’s wardrobe. And they all have one thing in common. They’ve been run over. We’re calling it Squash-Plush.

~ From the RoadkillToys.com website ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

I know a little language of my cat, though Dante says
that animals have no need of speech and Nature
abhors the superfluous. My cat is fluent. He
converses when he wants with me.

~ Robert Duncan from "A Little Language" ~

Photo by magdelana_b

Imposed Amnesia

Imposed amnesia is the modus operandi of the current moment. Not only is historical memory now sacrificed to the spectacles of consumerism, celebrity culture, hyped-up violence and a market-driven obsession with the self, but the very formative culture that makes compassion, justice and an engaged citizenry foundational to democracy has been erased from the language of mainstream politics and the diverse cultural apparatuses that support it.

~ Henry A. Giroux ~

Poetry Friday

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.

~ Jean Cocteau ~

Escape!

Books were this wonderful escape for me because I could open a book and disappear into it, and that was the only way out of that house when I was a kid.

~ Dean Koontz ~

Everything's Comin' Up Roses!

You could probably get us to set fire to our own trousers if there was a good laugh to be had in it somewhere . . . so after all the praise and awards that have been Heaped Upon Us, we decided it was time to add some substance to a phrase we often hear...with the launch of our special edition of Rose fragranced Poo-Pourri™ we can now proudly boast that we are the only company on earth (and possibly in the know-able universe) whose poo literally smells of roses.

~ News release on Sheep Poo Paper™ website ~

Image courtesy Sheep Poo Paper

Never Forget

God must have been on leave during the Holocaust.
~ Simon Wiesenthal ~

Photo of Kristallnacht courtesy USHMM

In Other Words--Practice!

You can't do sketches enough. Sketch everything and keep your curiosity fresh.

~ John Singer Sargent ~

Image courtesy Museum of Fine Arts

Sunday's Kat Kwote

Tee-shirt found here.

What a Sad Metaphor

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

~ Salvador Dalí ~

Poetry Friday

If I should make no poems any more
    There would be rest at least, so let it be;
Time to read books in other tongues and listen
    To the long mellow thunder of the sea.

~ Sara Teasdale from "Leisure" ~

Photo by explorer056

Veterans Day

Being a soldier, fighting for this country, is neither Republican nor Democrat.

~ Max Cleland ~

David Livingstone

Livingstone was equally at home wandering the wilds of Africa and making small talk over tea with the Queen. The public made his books best-sellers, his speeches standing room, his name household. Livingstone was beloved in Britain, and so famous worldwide that one poll showed that only Victoria herself was better known.

~ Martin Dugard from Into Africa ~

Photo courtesy National Trust for Scotland

Ha, Ha, Ha

Whiskey is by far the most popular of all remedies that won't cure a cold.

~ Jerry Vale ~

Photo by OctopusHat

Good Food All Over the World!

Good food is a global thing and I find that there is always something new and amazing to learn--I love it!

~ Jamie Oliver ~

Photo by hradcanska