Murky buildings

O Solitude! If I must with thee dwell, Let it not be among the jumbled heap of murky buildings.
John Keats

Girl with midnight black hair

When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.
Carl Sandburg

The wind is passing by

Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I: But when the trees bow down their heads, The wind is passing by.
Christina Rossetti

Love match for this week

The family is the school of duties … founded on love.
Felix Adler

Exception

How glorious it is - and also how painful - to be an exception.
Alfred de Musset

Birds singing upon our roofs

There are joys which long to be ours. God sends ten thousands truths, which come about us like birds seeking inlet; but we are shut up to them, and so they bring us nothing, but sit and sing awhile upon the roof, and then fly away.
Henry Ward Beecher

The muse is in the woods

Go to the country - The muse is in the woods.
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Time to stand and stare

What is this life if full of care
We have no time to stand and stare?
William Henry Davies

Walking

Walking . . . is how the body measures itself against the earth.
Rebecca Solnit

Trees

We have nothing to fear and a great deal to learn from trees, that vigorous and pacific tribe which without stint produces strengthening essences for us, soothing balms, and in whose gracious company we spend so many cool, silent and intimate hours.
Marcel Proust

Love boat

The love boat has crashed against the everyday.
Vladimir Mayakovsky

Faces

The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.
Marcel Proust

Perseverance

Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

We do not notice it

The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.
Charles Baudelaire

Meeting a stranger

We die to each other daily.
What we know of other people
Is only our memory of the moments
During which we knew them. And they have changed since then.
To pretend that they and we are the same
Is a useful and convenient social convention
Which must sometimes broken. We must also remember
That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.
T.S. Eliot

My desk

My desk, most loyal friend thank you. You’ve been with me on every road I’ve taken. My scar and my protection.
Marina Tsvetaeva

White moment

one pierced moment whiter than the rest
-turning from the tremendous lie of sleep
i watch the roses of the day grow deep
E.E. Cummings

The best thing

The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.
Audrey Hepburn

History

History is a child building a sand-castle by the sea, and that child is the whole majesty of man’s power in the world.
Heraclitus

Petals

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Don Marquis

Waiting

If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.
Oscar Wilde

Togetherness

Never the time and the place and the loved one all together!
Robert Browning

Under the sun

Under the sun
Are sixteen million men,
Chosen for shining teeth,
Sharp eyes, hard legs,
And a running of young warm blood in their wrists.

Carl Sandburg

Ever green

All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Leisure

This is very important -- to take leisure time. Pace is the essence. Without stopping entirely and doing nothing at all for great periods, you're gonna lose everything...just to do nothing at all, very, very important. And how many people do this in modern society? Very few. That's why they're all totally mad, frustrated, angry and hateful.
Charles Bukowski

Sea-sized soul

My soul is ten thousand miles wide and extremely invisibly deep. It is the same size as the sea, and you cannot, you cannot cram it into beer cans and fingernails and stake it out in lots and own it. It will drown you all and never even notice.
Ursula K. Le Guin

A house of many windows

The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Make houses shrink

Make houses shrink
And trees diminish
By going far; my look's leash
Dangles the puppet-people
Who, unaware how they dwindle,
Laugh, kiss, get drunk,
Nor guess that if I choose to blink
They die.

Sylvia Plath

Before breakfast

"There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
Lewis Carroll, from Alice in Wonderland

Practitioners of the city

Walkers are 'practitioners of the city', for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.
Rebecca Solnit

Wide worlds

I love wide, homogenous worlds, unstaked, unlimited like the sea, like high snows, deserts, and steppes.
Jean Dubuffet