beautiful drawings! love the climbing frame painting

“Why spend the afternoon making a meal that will be gone in an hour,” she’d ask us, “when in the same amount of time, I can do a painting that will last forever?”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“The sky was no longer blue. North-eastward it was inky black, and out of the blackness shone brightly and steadily the pale white stars. ” – H.G. Wells, Time Machine.

Alice: But I don’t want to go among mad people.
The Cat: Oh, you can’t help that. We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.
Alice: How do you know I’m mad?
The Cat: You must be. Or you wouldn’t have come here.

What a lovely book!

“The more that you read,
The more things you will know.
The more that you learn,
The more places you’ll go.”

I Can Read With My Eyes Shut, Dr. Seuss.

“If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation” — 1Q84

“The dead waved from the ditches in Korea. The arms of soldiers reached out from bodies half in, half out of the frozen mud, as if begging for help even after their hearts had cooled and the ice had glazed their eyes.” – Rick Bragg, All Over but the Shoutin’

“Please, draw me a sheep.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

The checkout part was my favorite. “Do you have a library card, young lady?” “Yeah! I do!” “Ma, where’s my card?” Julia Wertz, The Infinite Wait and Other Stories.

Oh my gosh I love her drawings! “Everything
everybody does is so—I don’t know—not wrong, or even mean, or even
stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and—sad-making. And
the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that,
you’re conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different
way.” (Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger)

“Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn’t glitter and shine.” ― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at the moment I was lifted and struck.” – Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“I never fall in love in August or September.”- This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald.

“Poetry and Hums aren’t things which you get, they’re things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you.”

A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

“Religion! Is what you hear at church religion? Is that which can bend and turn, and descend and ascend, to fit every crooked phase of selfish, worldly society, religion? Is that religion which is less scrupulous, less generous, less just, less considerate for man, than even my own ungodly, worldly, blinded nature? No! When I look for religion, I must look for something above me, and not something beneath.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

“You’ll find out it’s little savors and little things that count more than big ones. A walk on a spring morning is better than an eighty-mile ride in a hopped-up car, you know why? Because it’s full of flavors, full of a lot of things growing. You’ve time to seek and find. I know, you’re after the broad effect now, I suppose that’s fit and proper. But you got to look at grapes as well as watermelons. You greatly admire skeletons and I like fingerprints; well, and good. Right now such things are bothersome to you, and I wonder if it isn’t because you never learned to use them. If you had your way you’d pass a law to abolish all the little jobs, the little things. But then you’d leave yourselves nothing to do between the big jobs and you’d have a devil of a time thinking up things? Cutting grass and pulling weeds can be a way of life.”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

“I ought not to have listened to her,” he confided to me one day. “One never ought to listen to the flowers. One should simply look at them and breathe their fragrance. Mine perfumed all my planet. But I did not know how to take pleasure in all her grace. This tale of claws, which disturbed me so much, should only have filled my heart with tenderness and pity.”

Le Petit Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“One afflicted with a painful or loathsome disease, one who is a heavy burden to those he cares for, one threatened with insanity, one without property, employment, or hope, one who has disgraced himself, one irreclaimably addicted to drunkenness!”

— The Old Gringo by Carlos Fuentes

“On Saturday he ate through one piece of chocolate cake, one ice-cream cone, one pickle, one slice of Swiss cheese, one slice of salami, one lollipop, one piece of cherry pie, one sausage, one cupcake, and one slice of watermelon. That night he had a stomachache! The next day was Sunday again. The caterpillar ate through one nice green leaf, and after that he felt much better.”

- Eric Carle, The Very Hungry Caterpillar

“Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.” Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth

Le vent se frayait un chemin parmi les feuilles et ressortait des arbres tout chargé d’odeurs de
bourgeons et de fleurs.
(…)
Le soleil dépliait lentement ses rayons et les hasardait, avec
précaution, dans des endroits qu’il ne pouvait atteindre
directement, les recourbant à angles arrondis et onctueux,
mais se heurtait à des choses très noires et les retirait
très vite, d’un mouvement nerveux et précis de poulpe doré.
Son immense carcasse brûlante se rapprocha peu à peu,
puis se mit, immobile, à vaporiser les eaux continentales et
les horloges sonnèrent trois coups.

Boris Vian

L’écume des jours, 1947

I gave this, my favourite novel, away many moons ago, but it bangs around my brain to this day. This is only one of the myriad great passages in the book.

“It is, I suppose, the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality. It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood.

Can we blame the child for resenting the fantasy of largeness? Big, soft arms and deep voices in the dark saying, “Tell Papa, tell Mama, and we’ll make it right.” The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child’s need for exactly that sanctuary. How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia.
Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites.
We need that warm adult stupidity. Even knowing the illusion, we cry and hide in their laps, speaking only of defiled lollipops or lost bears, and getting lollipop or a toy bear’d worth of comfort. We make do with it rather than face alone the cavernous reaches of our skull for which there is no remedy, no safety, no comfort at all. We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness.”
― Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

“Do justice to the lovely time and climb up to the terrace. Bees’ whiskers dripping honey, they thread the flowery paths; swallows’ beaks filled with mud, they seek ornamented eaves. The herd boy with his solitary calf sings in the rustic garden; gathering mulberry leaves, the wandering girls feed the new-hatched silkworms. If there is anything further in your life, work diligently at it. Why sit around all depressed and sad, just terrified of difficulties?”

Sun Ch’eng-tse

–Why are we fighting them?
–They’re mad. We’re sane.
–How do we know?
–That we’re sane?
–Yes.
–Am I sane?
–To all appearances.
–And you, do you consider yourself sane?
–I do.
–Well, there you have it.
–But don’t they also consider themselves sane?
–I think they know. Deep down. They they’re not sane.
–How must that make them feel?
–Terrible, I should think. They must fight ever more fiercely, in order to deny what they know to be true. That they are not sane.

Donald Barthelme, Indian Uprising

“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”
― Charles Bukowski

Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet earth.

Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star.

-2001 A Space Odyssey

“The art is what has happened to the viewer” Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees by Lawrence Weschler conversing with Robert Irwin

”The sporting editors had also given me $300 in cash, most of which was already spent on extremely dangerous drugs. The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. we had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-coloured-uppers, downers screamers, laughers….and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.” -Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“‘No; that doesn’t interest me.’
‘That’s because you never read a book about it.’”

- Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” -Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy

“so it goes” -vonnegut, slaughterhouse 5

“I guess you are kind of curious as to who I am, but I am one of those who do not have a regular name. My name depends on you. Just call me whatever is in your mind.
If you are thinking about something that happened a long time ago: Somebody asked you a question and you did not know the answer.
That is my name.
Perhaps it was raining very hard.
That is my name.
Or somebody wanted you to do something. You did it. Then they told you what you did was wrong—“Sorry for the mistake,”—and you had to do something else.
That is my name.
Perhaps it was a game you played when you were a child or something that came idly into your mind when you were old and sitting in a chair near the window.
That is my name.
Or you walked someplace. There were flowers all around.
That is my name.
Perhaps you stared into a river. There as something near you who loved you. They were about to touch you. You could feel this before it happened. Then it happened.
That is my name.”
― Richard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar

What a lovely looking book. I’ll give this a shot.
“Never make a decision when you need to pee.” Beautiful Losers, Leonard Cohen

“Sometimes this fellow’s music was like little colored pieces of crystal candy, and other times it was the softest, saddest thing she had ever imagined about.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

“Assumptions are dangerous things to make, and like all dangerous things to make–bombs for instance, or strawberry shortcake–if you make even the tiniest mistake you can find yourself in terrible trouble. Making assumptions simply means believing things are a certain way with little or no evidence that shows you are correct, and you can see how this can lead to terrible trouble. For instance, one morning you might wake up and make the assumption that your bed was in the same place that it always was, even though you would have no real evidence that this was so. But when you got out of your bed, you might discover that it has floated out to sea, and now you would be in terrible trouble all because of the incorrect assumption that you’d made. You can see that it is better not to make too many assumptions, particularly in the morning.”

A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Austere Academy, by Lemony Snickett

It’s only a story. None of it really happened. How could it? How could such people be? The prisoner is probably a professor. The sheriff loses the next election. The truckdriver died of emphysema. And as for the cowboy, that character, why nobody even knows where he is anymore. Or even, to be honest, if he ever really was

the very first passage of The Brave Cowboy by Edward Abbey.

“I imagined myself as Frida to Diego, both muse and maker. I dreamed of meeting an artist to love and support and work with side by side.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“A light here required a shadow there.”
Virginia Woolfe: To the Lighthouse

All grown-ups were children first. – My Favorite Passages from The Little Prince

“If you will cling to nature, to the simple in nature, to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiterable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you, not in your intellect, perhaps, which lags marveling behind, but in your inmost consciousness, waking and cognizance.

You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

― Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
-George Orwell, 1984