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