Clouds to add color.

Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.
- Rabindranath Tagore

The safe place.

The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.
- Maya Angelou

The genius of childhood

What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some day, or even a great painter. But then he will have to begin everything again, from zero.
Pablo Picasso

Our lights

We waste our lights in vain, like lamps by day.
William Shakespeare

New kind of togetherness

People nowadays like to be together not in the old-fashioned way of, say, mingling on the piazza of an Italian Renaissance city, but, instead, huddled together in traffic jams, bus queues, on escalators and so on. It’s a new kind of togetherness which may seem totally alien, but it’s the togetherness of modern technology.
J. G. Ballard

We trample grass

We trample grass, and prize the flowers of May; yet the grass is green when the flower fades away.
Robert Southwell

Sweetest fruits

Of all pleasures the fruit of labor is the sweetest.
Luc de Clapiers

Mariners, waiting for the night sky

Ideals are like the stars: we never reach them, but like the mariners of the sea, we chart our course by them.
Carl Schurz

Time

Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
Thomas Mann

High hopes

A cathedral, a wave of storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.
Marcel Proust

The sky

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

A candle

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--
It gives a lovely light!

Edna St. Vincent Millay

The right way

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Friendship

Friendship is a sheltering tree.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The silence of a flower

The silence of a flower: a kind of silence which we continually evade, of which we find only the shadow in dreams.
Lewis Thompson

Smell the flowers

Don’t hurry, don’t worry. You’re only here for a short visit. So be sure to stop and smell the flowers.
Walter Hagen

to hold our destiny in ourselves

It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.
-William Shakespeare

offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light.

But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her,
barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window
in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the poor.
She will look in at me with her thin arms extended,
offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light.
-William Collins

An arch.

An arch never sleeps.
-Hindu proverb

Human bridge.

We build too many walls and not enough bridges.
-Isaac Newton

If I were two-faced

If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?
-Abraham Lincoln

...That we may record our emptiness.

Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky,
We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.
-Khalil Gibran

Memory of roses.

God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.
-J.M. Barrie

Green.

Green how I want you green. Green wind. Green branches.
-Lorca, Federico Garcia

Aye, what then?

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream,
and have a flower presented to him
as a pledge that his soul had really been there,
and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake -
Aye, what then?
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Falling

Fish die belly upward, and rise to the surface. Its their way of falling.
Andre Gide

A silent finger

An instinctive taste teaches men to build their churches with spire steeples which point as with a silent finger to the sky and stars.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Yellow

It is the color closest to light.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe

Writing

First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.
Robert Cecil Day-Lewis

Buildings

The job of buildings is to improve human relations: architecture must ease them, not make them worse.
Ralph Erskine