Monday, August 31, 2009

Murky buildings

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

Sunday, August 30, 2009

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

Saturday, August 29, 2009

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

Friday, August 28, 2009

Love match for this week

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

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Exception

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

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

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

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

The muse is in the woods

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

Monday, August 24, 2009

Time to stand and stare

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

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Walking

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

Saturday, August 22, 2009

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

Friday, August 21, 2009

Love boat

The love boat has crashed against the everyday.
Vladimir Mayakovsky

Thursday, August 20, 2009

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

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

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

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

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

Monday, August 17, 2009

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

Sunday, August 16, 2009

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

Saturday, August 15, 2009

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

Friday, August 14, 2009

The best thing

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

Thursday, August 13, 2009

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

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Petals

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

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Waiting

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

Monday, August 10, 2009

Togetherness

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

Sunday, August 9, 2009

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

Saturday, August 8, 2009

Ever green

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

Friday, August 7, 2009

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

Thursday, August 6, 2009

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

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

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

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

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

Monday, August 3, 2009

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

Sunday, August 2, 2009

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

Saturday, August 1, 2009

Wide worlds

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