The city of cats

The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.
Italo Calvino

Someone we can always blame for everything

If God lived on earth we would break his windows.
Jewish proverb

The first kiss

The decision to kiss for the first time is the most crucial in any love story. It changes the relationship of two people much more strongly than even the final surrender; because this kiss already has within it that surrender.
Emil Ludwig

Sorrow

Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Places

How hard it is to escape from places. However carefully one goes they hold you - you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences - like rags and shreds of your very life.
Katherine Mansfield

Desire to fall

Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.
Salman Rushdie

Watching my life.

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
- George Eliot

Love, a concept within concepts.

Lovers, forget your love,
And list to the love of these,
She a window flower,
And he a winter breeze.
- Robert Frost

A difficult decision.

One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
- Andre Gide

my smiles, my stories, all over my body.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
- Mark Twain

The shadows fall behind you

Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall behind you.
- Maori Proverb

Co-existing worlds or the balance.

Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Between today and tomorrow.

Exactly at midnight
yesterday sighs away.
- William Stafford

My private cutout of the sky

We think too small, like the frog at the bottom of the well. He thinks the sky is only as big as the top of the well.
Mao Tse-Tung

From a poem

I'll just be what I am
Without root without branch without crown
I'll lean on myself
On my own bumps and bruises

Vasko Popa

Waiting

How much of human life is lost in waiting.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Listen

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
Franz Kafka

Not even a snowflake

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.
Henry David Thoreau

Flying

Fences are made for those who cannot fly.
Elbert Hubbard

If I had only known...

If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith.
Albert Einstein

A well-tied tie. A choice.

A well-tied tie is the first serious step in life.
- Oscar Wilde

Fresh, clean, joy.

Fresh clean sheets are one of life's small joys.
- Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

Conquering.

It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.
- Edmund Hillary

Always and never the same.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

A good deed in a naughty world.

How far that little candle throws its beams, So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
- Shakespeare.

Ritual to sleep.

For sleep, one needs endless depths of blackness to sink into; daylight is too shallow, it will not cover one. 
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Buildings and People.

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.
- Winston Churchill

Exhausted

An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted
Arthur Miller