Escape

"All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape." - Arthur Christopher Benson

"If you think you're free, there's no escape possible." -Ram Dass

"The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds. " -John Maynard Keynes

“I NEVER hear the word “escape”
Without a quicker blood,
A sudden expectation,
A flying attitude.” –Emily Dickinson

“Our thoughts always escape from whoever tries to smother them.” –Victor Hugo

“You call yourself free? I want to hear your ruling thought and not that you have escaped a yoke. Are you such a one as was permitted to escape a yoke? There are some who threw away their ultimate worth when they threw away their servitude. Free from what? What is that to Zarathustra! But your eyes should announce to me brightly: free for what?” -Friedrich Nietzsche

"Escape" by Julie Edwards Uk

Mirrors

“My role in society, or any artist or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.“-John Lennon, Interview, December 8, 1980, KFRC RKO Radio. Given the day of his death.

"There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it."-Edith Wharton

"Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind."-Catherine Drinker Bowen

"Since you know you cannot see yourself
So well as by reflection, I, your glass,
Will modestly discover to yourself
That of yourself which yet you know not of."-William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

"Now we see through a glass, darkly."-New Testament

"Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life’s true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates."-Franz Grillparzer

"Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror cracked from side to side;
‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried
The Lady of Shalott."-Alfred Tennyson, The Lady of Shalott

"When those who have the power to name and to socially construct reality choose not to see you or hear you ... when someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked in the mirror and saw nothing. It takes some strength of soul—and not just individual strength, but collective understanding—to resist this void, this non-being, into which you are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard."-Adrienne Rich


"Modernity, Mirrored and Reflected Infinitely" by KrassyCanDoIt

Endings

"Lands End" by Bexy87

"The drama of life begins with a wail and ends with a sigh."-Minna Antrim

"It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between."-Diane Ackerman

"There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life."-Frederico Fellini

"We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started... and know the place for the first time."-T. S. Eliot

"There is no feast on earth which does not end in parting."-Chinese proverb

“Golden lads and girls all must
Like chimney-sweepers, come to dust.”-Shakespeare, Cymbeline

"If my ship sails from sight, it doesn't mean my journey ends, it simply means the river bends."-John Enoch Powell

Dragons

Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus (Latin: "Never Tickle a Sleeping Dragon")
J.K.Rowling - Harry Potter, the Hogwarts motto

"Dragons beget dragons, and phoenixes, phoenixes; and the offspring of mice will know how to chew holes."-Chinese proverb.

"Bargain not with a dragon."
Dragonslayer's Guyde

“Fairy Tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”- G. K. Chesterton

"The age of chivalry is past. Bores have succeeded to dragons."- Benjamin Disraeli

"Come not between the dragon, and his wrath."
-William Shakespeare, King Lear

“So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their ending.”- J.R.R. Tolkien

"The man who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself" -Friedrich Nietzsche
“The librarian of today, and it will be true still more of the librarians of tomorrow, are not fiery dragons interposed between the people and the books. They are useful public servants, who manage libraries in the interest of the public . . . Many still think that a great reader, or a writer of books, will make an excellent librarian. This is pure fallacy.”- William Osler



"Dragon Sketch" by b.r.e.n.d.a.

Dreams

"Untitled" by Sheila Steele

"But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."-William Butler Yeats

"All men dream, but unequally. Those that dream at night in the dusty recesses of their minds awake the next day to find that their dreams were just vanity. But those who dream during the day with their eyes wide open are dangerous men; they act out their dreams to make them reality." -Thomas E. Lawrence

"The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it."-William Faulkner

"If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time." -Marcel Proust

"I have dreamed in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind."-Emily Bronte

"How do you go from where you are to where you want to be? I think you have to have an enthusiasm for life. You have to have a dream, a goal, and you have to be willing to work for it." -Jim Valvano

"I dream of painting and then I paint my dream."-Vincent Van Gogh

"Only when we break the mirror and climb into our vision,
only when we are the wind together streaming and singing,
only in the dream we become with our bones for spears,
we are real at last
and wake."-Marge Piercy

“Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.”- Erich Fromm

“We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”- William Shakespeare, The Tempest

"All books are either dreams or swords."-Amy Lowell

"When I dream, I am ageless."-Elizabeth Coatsworth


"Untitled" by Sheila Steele

The Moon

"Image from that Dream I Had about the End of the World" by inkswamp

“I danced in the morning when the world was begun,
And I danced in the moon and the stars and the sun,
And I came down from heaven and I danced on the earth,
At Bethlehem I had my birth.”- Sydney Carter, Lord of the Dance

"There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery."- Joseph Conrad

“When we describe the moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness.”- D.H. Lawrence

“It takes the moon for this. The sun’s a wizard
By all I tell; but so’s the moon a witch.”-Robert Frost, A Hillside Thaw

“The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.”- Sylvia Plath,The Moon and the Yew Tree

"Gray hairs seem to my fancy like the soft light of the moon, silvering over the evening of life."- Jean Paul Richter

“She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smooths the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.”- T.S. Eliot, Rhapsody on a Windy Night

“When over the houses, a golden illusion
Brings back an earlier season of quiet
And quieting dreams in the sleepers in darkness
The moon is the mother of pathos and pity.”- Wallace Stevens, Lunar Paraphrase

"Perhaps the crescent moom smiles in doubt at being told that it is a fragment awaiting perfection."-Rabindranath Tagore, Fireflies

“The faery beam upon you,
The stars to glisten on you,
A moon of light
In the noon of night
Till the firedrake hath o’er gone you.”- Ben Jonson

“In the first of the moon,
All’s a scattering,
A shining.”- Theodore Roethke

The Future

"Those of us who are in this world to educate—to care for—young children have a special calling: a calling that has very little to do with the collection of expensive possessions but has a lot to do with the worth inside of heads and hearts. In fact, that’s our domain: the heads and hearts of the next generation, the thoughts and feelings of the future."-Fred M. Rogers

"I go to school to youth to learn the future."-Robert Frost, What Fifty Said

"The power we exert over the future behavior of our children is enormous. Even after they have left home, even after we have left the world, there will always be part of us that will remain with them forever."-Neil Kurshan

"There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in."-Deepak Chopra

"To be motivated to sit at home and study, instead of going out and playing, children need a sense of themselves over time—they need to be able to picture themselves in the future.... If they can’t, then they’re simply reacting to daily events, responding to the needs of the moment—for pleasure, for affiliation, for acceptance."-Stanley I. Greenspan

"The decision to have a child is both a private and a public decision, for children are our collective future."-Sylvia Ann Hewlett

"If the children and youth of a nation are afforded opportunity to develop their capacities to the fullest, if they are given the knowledge to understand the world and the wisdom to change it, then the prospects for the future are bright. In contrast, a society which neglects its children, however well it may function in other respects, risks eventual disorganization and demise."-Urie Bronfenbrenner

"The visions we offer our children shape the future. It matters what those visions are. Often they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Dreams are maps."-Carl Sagan

"When we heard about the hippies, the barely more than boys and girls who decided to try something different ... we laughed at them. Smug in our certain awareness that ... communal life must be more difficult even than nuclear family life, which we know, to our very nerve endings, is disastrous, we condemned them, our children, for seeking a different future. We hated them for their flowers, for their love, and for their unmistakable rejection of every hideous, mistaken compromise that we had made throughout our hollow, money- bitten, frightened, adult lives."-June Jordan

"In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists."-Eric Hoffer

"The ability to think straight, some knowledge of the past, some vision of the future, some skill to do useful service, some urge to fit that service into the well-being of the community—these are the most vital things education must try to produce."-Virginia Gildersleeve

"And all your future lies beneath your hat."-John Oldham Lines to a Friend About to Leave the University

"The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."-Albert Einstein

"The empires of the future are empires of the mind."-Winston Churchill

"We are the echo of the future."-W.S. Merwin

Play

“Play is the highest form of research.” -Albert Einstein

“Do not keep children to their studies by compulsion but by play.”-Plato

"One way to think about play, is as the process of finding new combinations for known things—combinations that may yield new forms of expression, new inventions, new discoveries, and new solutions....It’s exactly what children’s play seems to be about and explains why so many people have come to think that children’s play is so important a part of childhood—and beyond."-Fred Rogers

“Ours is now a world that demands that people know how to learn new things–especially technical things–quickly and well; that they know how to collaborate, especially with people not just like themselves; and that they know how to think strategically and laterally as well as linearly and logically. These are all skills that good video games demand and teach.”-Marc Prensky

“[Students] approach learning as a ‘plug-and-play’ experience; they are unaccustomed and unwilling to learn sequentially–to read the manual–and, instead, are inclined to plunge in and learn through participation and experimentation. Although this type of learning is quite different, it may be more effective for this generation, particularly when provided through a media-rich environment.” — James J. Duderstadt and Farris W. Womack, The Future of the Public University in America: Beyond the Crossroads
“Whoever wants to understand much must play much.” — Gottfried Benn

“Children at play are not playing about. Their games should be seen as their most serious minded activity.” -Michel de Montaigne

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct.” — Carl Jung
“Play is training for the unexpected.” — Marc Bekoff

“The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery.” — Erik H. Erikson

"If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play."
-John Cleese

"Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions."
-Mark Twain

"The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he's always doing both."
-James Michener


Photo: "The Sandbox" by Ricardo Carreon

Control

"Leadership is a matter of having people look at you and gain confidence, seeing how you react. If you're in control, they're in control."-Tom Landry

"To do the same thing over and over again is not only boredom: it is to be controlled by rather than to control what you do."- Heraclitus

"Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement."-Peter F. Drucker

"If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough."
- Mario Andretti

"When I grip the wheel too tight, I find I lose control."-Steve Rapson

"Give up control even if it means the employees have to make some mistakes."-Frank Flores

"Roll on, deep and dark blue ocean, roll. Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain. Man marks the earth with ruin, but his control stops with the shore."- Lord Byron

"Regardless of how you feel inside, always try to look like a winner. Even if you are behind, a sustained look of control and confidence can give you a mental edge that results in victory."-Arthur Ashe

"The mind never need stop growing. Indeed, one of the few experiences which never pall is the experience of watching one's own mind and how it produces new interests, responds to new stimuli, and develops new thoughts, apparently without effort and almost independently of one's own conscious control."-Gilbert Highet

“Not being able to control events, I control myself; and I adapt myself to them, if they do not adapt themselves to me.”- Michel de Montaigne

“If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins.”-Benjamin Franklin

“Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know - and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance.”-Isaac Asimov

“Of all men's miseries the bitterest is this: to know so much and to have control over nothing.”-Herodotus

“Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.”- Adrienne Rich, Storm Warnings

“Give me a staff of honor for mine age,
But not a sceptre to control the world.”- William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus

“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.”- Philip K. Dick

“I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration; I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming”-Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Photo by Sebastian’s Belle

Connections

"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect...”-Edward M. Forster

"In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it."- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as courses, and they come back to us as effects."- Herman Melville

"One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort."-Gaston Bachelard

“I was the girl of the chain letter, the girl full of talk of coffins and keyholes, the one of the telephone bills, the wrinkled photo and the lost connections....”- Anne Sexton, “Love Song”

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”-Albert Einstein

“I am a part of all that I have met.”- Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

“One could not pluck a flower without troubling a star.”
-Francis Thompson

“All things are connected, like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.”
-Chief Seattle, Chief Seattle's Letter to All, 1854

“No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”
-John Donne, Meditation XVII

Censorship

"The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion." -Henry Steele Commager

"We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still." -John Stuart Mill

"Fear of corrupting the mind of the younger generation is the loftiest of cowardice."
-Holbrook Jackson

"Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always be the last resort of the boob and the bigot." -Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings." -Heinrich Heine

"Every burned book enlightens the world."-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."-Voltaire

Illustration by Isaac Mao

Quotations

"He wrapped himself in quotations - as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors."-Rudyard Kipling

“When a thing has been said and well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.” -Anatole France

“Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.”-Samuel Johnson

“There is not less wit nor less invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought.”-Pierre Bayle

“A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.”-Dorothy L. Sayers, Lord Peter Whimsey (fictional detective)

“She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit.”-W. Somerset Maugham

"I hate quotation. Tell me what you know."-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it."-Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A short saying oft contains much wisdom.”-Sophocles

“The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages is preserved into perpetuity by a nation's proverbs, fables, folk sayings and quotations.”-William Feather

"I didn't really say everything I said."-Yogi Berra

Boundaries

"I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries, shutting out and shutting in, separating inside from outside: I have drawn no lines:" -Archie Randolph Ammons, Corsons Inlet

"The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom." -bell hooks

"We love to overlook the boundaries which we do not wish to pass." -Samuel Johnson

"The lives of happy people are dense with their own doings--crowded, active, thick. But the sorrowing are nomads, on a plain with few landmarks and no boundaries; sorrow's horizons are vague and its demands are few." -Larry Mcmurtry

"I think it's the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately." -George Carlin

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -Arthur C. Clarke

"The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for your wits to grow sharper." -Eden Phillpotts

"The space within becomes the reality of the building."-Frank Lloyd Wright



Photo by Makz - Some rights reserved

Horses

"Horses and children, I often think, have a lot of the good sense there is in the world." -Josephine Demott Robinson (1865–1948), U.S. circus performer. The Circus Lady, ch. 16 (1926).

"When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it; the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes." -William Shakespeare, Henry V

"Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hooves i’ the receiving earth;
For ‘tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings."
-William Shakespeare, Chorus, in Henry V, prologue

"The essential joy of being with horses is that it brings us in contact with the rare elements of grace, beauty, spirit, and fire." -Sharon Ralls Lemon

"In riding a horse we borrow freedom." -Helen Thomson

"If a horse has four legs, and I'm riding it, I think I can win"
-Angel Cordero

Autumn

“Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.” -Faith Baldwin

“Autumn, the year's last, loveliest smile.” -William Cullen Bryant

“Every leaf speaks bliss to me, fluttering from the autumn tree” -Emily Bronte

“On the motionless branches of some trees, autumn berries hung like clusters of coral beads, as in those fabled orchards where the fruits were jewels . . .” -Charles Dickens

“Now Autumn's fire burns slowly along the woods
And day by day the dead leaves fall and melt.” -William Allingham

"Corn and grain, corn and grain,
All that falls shall rise again."
- Wiccan Harvest Chant

"There is no season when such pleasant and sunny spots
may be lighted on, and produce so pleasant an effect on
the feelings, as now in October."
-Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Yellow, mellow, ripened days" -Will Carleton

"O, it sets my heart a clickin' like the tickin' of a clock,
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock."
-James Whitcomb Riley

"Autumn’s the mellow time." -William Allingham, The Winter Pear

"I trust in Nature for the stable laws Of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant And Autumn garner to the end of time." -Robert Browning, A Soul’s Tragedy

" When summer gathers up her robes of glory, and like a dream of beauty glides away." -Sarah Helen Power Whitman

Lightning

"Lightning is the shorthand of a storm, and tells of chaos." -Eric Mackay

"Thunder is impressive, but it is lightning that does the work." -Mark Twain

"The reason lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place is that the same place isn't there the second time." -Willie Tyler

"When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain? When the hurly-burly’s done, When the battle’s lost and won."
-William Shakespeare, First and Second Witches, in Macbeth


"Lightning in Purple Clouds" by infinite magic
Some rights reserved

"Pourquoi? Pourquoi pas?"

When I was in college, I went to a screening of the French classic, "A Man and a Woman". During the film's most famous conversation, one of the characters asked "Why?"; "Why not?" replied the other.

Clay Burell directed me to Quotiki, a site for saving and searching quotations, but my efforts to contribute have been largely ignored or rejected. So I decided to start another blog solely as a repository for the quotes that are now clogging my document files. Why not?

The title and tag will indicate the theme. If Clay, or anyone else, can explain how to widgetize my offerings, I'd be happy to do so.

Until then, this blog will have to serve.

"Our necessities are few, but our wants are endless." -George Bernard Shaw