Theodor Geisel (Dr Seus) “I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities.” .
Xenocrates “I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.” . Marcel Gagnon figures - Centre D'Arte, Sainte-Flavie, Quebec
Henry Miller “One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” .
William Kentridge “The absurd, with its rupture of rationality-of conventional ways of seeing the world-is in fact an accurate and a productive way of understanding the world." . A snippet from Kentridge’s video installation ‘More Sweetly Play the Dance’ (Marian Goodman Gallery, London, 2015)
From 'Solitude' by Katherine Philips (1631–1664) an adaptation of La Solitude, by Antoine Girard de Saint-Amant (1594–1661) “O! Solitude, my sweetest choice Places devoted to the night Remote from tumult and from noise” . Henry Purcell – O Solitude - Andreas Scholl youtu.be/5y69gogMrvo
From 'Autumn Sky' by Charles Simic The stars know everything, So we try to read their minds. As distant as they are, We choose to whisper in their presence. .
Ruth Thorne-Thomsen - Levitating Man, Wisconsin (from the Door series), 1983
Ursula K. Le Guin (from Hymn to Time) Time is being and being time, it is all one thing, the shining, the seeing, the dark abounding. .
'Black Spray' (1956) - Alexander Calder - at The Berardo Collection Museum, Lisbon - Portugal "To most people who look at a mobile, it's no more than a series of flat objects that move. To a few, though, it may be poetry." . Photo: 2016
Jorge Luis Borges "Scattered through the ordinary world there are books and artifacts and perhaps people who are like doorways into impossible realms, of impossible and contradictory truth" .
From Leonard Cohen’s acceptance speech for the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature in 2011:
Remembering Lawrence Ferlinghetti on his birthday today. "The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it." .
Milan Kundera (Immortality) “The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia.” .
Bob Kaufman - from Jail Poems (Written in San Francisco City Prison, Cell 3, 1959) 26 I sit here writing, not daring to stop, For fear of seeing what's outside my head. .
Homage by Leopoldo Maler, 1974. Hess Collection, Napa .
For today's #BlueSkyArtShow - #Horizonal Jane Hirshfield "Today, my hope is vertical. Tomorrow it will be horizontal. The next day, cloudy." .
Rene Magritte "Nothing is confused, except the mind." . Duane Michals - Rene Magritte in Bowler Hat (Multiple Exposure), 1965
Mervyn Peake (extract from 'Is There no Love Can Link Us?') Is there no love can link us – I and they? Only this hectic moment? This fierce instant Striking now Its universal, its uneven blow? There is no other link. Only this sliding Second we share: this desperate edge of now. .
G.K. Chesterton “The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head.” .
T. S. Eliot - from East Coker (Four Quartets) "...old stones that cannot be deciphered."
Robin Wall Kimmerer - Braiding Sweetgrass “Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart.” .
Henry Miller - Black Spring (page 14) "...everything moves on shifting levels - our thoughts, our dreams, our actions, our whole life." .
Jorge Luis Borges - The Moon (for Maria Kodama) There is such loneliness in that gold. The moon of the nights is not the moon Whom the first Adam saw. The long centuries Of human vigil have filled her With ancient lament. Look at her. She is your mirror. .
John Steinbeck - Travels with Charley: In Search of America “I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.” .
George Carlin “There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.” .
Iris Murdoch (from The Message to the Planet). "Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wave-length of ours all they hear is a continuous scream." . Picasso - Guernica, 1937
Robert Walser From ‘Too Philosophical ‘ (translated by Daniele Pantano) How ghostly my life in its fall and rise. Always I see myself waving to myself, floating away from the one waving. .
