"... the thing I love best in literature. It takes a personal question (or a moment of doubt could be another way of thinking about it) and interrogates lines of inquiry surrounding that question, historically and psychologically. After a while the answer is known but it no longer matters because the expanding life of the question is what keeps us reading. This is the kind of book that demands I slow down the closer I get to its end, preparing myself for the loss of the speaker in my world." Claudia Rankine

“The songs of the guardians of silence

are the most powerful.” Joy Harjo 

“I had been looking at the world as if it were cracks in a pavement. But it’s not about the individual cracks, it’s about the patterns and the networks...” Jonathan Ledgard

"When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of poetry twice." Robert Frank

“I think the chanciest thing is to put spirituality in art,...Because people don’t understand it. Writers don’t know what to do with it. They’re scared of it, so they ignore it. But if there’s going to be any universal consciousness-raising, you have to deal with it, even though people will ridicule you.” Betye Saar

“…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

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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

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surprised a napping fawn in the meadow

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a crow stole an egg from our dove residents

“It isn’t about being entertaining or pretty,” he said, taking a drag on his cigar. “Art is about expanding intelligence and broadening the viewer’s capacity to understand the world.”
Pedro Cabrita Reis

“I would say that I’ve tried, in my work, to find out how to live life — tried to explore what our existence really is and the meaning of it.”
Martin Scorsese

"Novelists are like fur trappers. They disappear into the north woods for months or years at a time, sometimes never to reemerge, giving in to despair out there, or going native (taking a real job, in other words), or catching their legs in their own traps and bleeding out, silently, into the snow. The lucky ones return, laden with pelts."

Jeffrey Eugenides

"I will close with what Meadow once told me about being an artist. It is partly a confidence game. And partly magic. But to make something you also need to be a gleaner. What is a gleaner? Well, it is a nice word for a thief, except you take what no one wants. Not just unusual ideas or things. You look closely at the familiar to discover what everyone else overlooks or ignores or discards."
Dana Spiotta from Innocents and Others

"They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night"
Edgar Allen Poe