“…when it comes to the sacred — which is what she’s really talking about — the line between freakish and sublime is slight in every culture.” Holland Cotter in review of Mrinalini Mukherjee work

"Sometimes he wondered what zone of transit he himself was entering, sure that his own withdrawal was symptomatic not of dormant schizophrenia, but of careful preparation for a radically new environment, with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would merely be an incumbrance."
from The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard 

"The hardest thing of all is to see what is really there."
J.A. Baker in The Peregrine

sketchbook

today's mood

"...Western civilization is suffering from a great sickness of the soul. The West's progressive turning away from functioning spiritual values; its total disregard for the environment and the protection of natural resources; the violence of inner cities with their problems of poverty, drugs, and crime; spiraling unemployment and economic disarray; and a growing intolerance toward people of color and the values of other cultures- all of these trends, if unchecked, will eventually bring about a terrible self-destruction."
Malidoma Patrice Some from Of Water and the Spirit

"To perceive matter that casts no shadow, you must search not for its presence but for its consequence." Robert Macfarlane in Underland

"Great art is connected with courage and truthfulness. There is a conception of truth, a lack of illusion, an ability to overcome selfish obsessions, which goes with good art, and the artist has got to have that particular sort of moral stamina. Good art, whatever its style, has qualities of hardness, firmness, realism, clarity, detachment, justice, truth. It is the work of a free, unfettered, uncorrupted imagination. Whereas bad art is the soft, messy self-indulgent work of an enslaved fantasy." Iris Murdoch

"There is no overstating the triumph of having remained motivated by beauty in taking down the ugliest of malignancies of human nature’s grasp for power. "

Maria Popova about Rachel Carson