“Sometimes since I’ve been in the garden I’ve looked up through the trees at the sky and I have had a strange feeling of being happy as if something was pushing and drawing in my chest …

Are we more vitally conscious than an Egyptian 3000 years B.C. was? Are we? Probably we are less. Our conscious range is wide, but shallow as a sheet of paper. We have no depth to our consciousness…

Everything matters. The Universe is approximately fifteen billion years old, and I swear that in all that time, nothing has ever happened that has not mattered, has not contributed in some way to t…

People disagreeing on all just about everything, yep Makes you stop and all wonder why Why only yesterday I saw somebody on the street Who just couldn’t help but cry Oh, this ol’ river …

Oh, let me see your beauty when the witnesses are goneLet me feel you moving like they do in BabylonShow me slowly what I only know the limits ofDance me to the end of loveDance me to the end of lo…

Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all, And sweetest in the gale is heard; And sore must be the storm That could abas…

Blessed are those who can give without remembering, and take without forgetting. –Elizabeth Bibesco, The Fir and the Palm (1924) Elizabeth Bibesco (1897-1948) was one of those deeply interest…

“That’s the place to get to—nowhere. One wants to wander away from the world’s somewheres, into our own nowhere.” –D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love (1920) Our own nowhere, as Lawrence put it, is …

There’s nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book. –Carson McCullers, The Sojourner (1950) Or an unfinished pa…

Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die…

Going to be brief this morning. I’m on the road, headed to Alexandria for my annual Gallery Talk at the Principle Gallery…

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood. How grass can be nourishing in the mouths of the lambs. How rivers and stones are forever in allegiance with gravity while we ourselves…

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and …

A thinking man’s greatest happiness is to have fathomed what can be fathomed and to revere in silence what cannot be fathomed. –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections (1833)…

One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Don’t hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another …

A great flame follows a little spark. —Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy (1321) Whenever I come across this tiny piece while going through my old work, I have to stop and consider it. Just somethi…

The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left beh…

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everythi…

True art and true science possess two unmistakable marks: the first, an inward mark, which is this, that the servitor of art and science will fulfil his vocation, not for profit but with self- sacr…

With my ninth mind I resurrect my first and dance slow to the music of my soul made new. –Aberjhani, Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black (2012) This aphorism from American poet/author Aberj…

dreamtree, truthtree tree of jubilee: with aeons of (trivial merely) existence, all when may not measure a now of your treasure –e.e. cummings, from Poem 90 in 95 Poems (1958) This is the tit…

Sometimes the most important thing an accomplished person can do is quiet their cleverness. –Larry Robertson, Great Question (2026) I don’t think I’ve ever used a quote from someb…

Mama’s in the factory She ain’t got no shoes Daddy’s in the alley He’s lookin’ for food I’m in the kitchen With the tombstone blues –Bob Dylan, Tombstone Blues (1965) A week or tw…

The true thrift is always to spend on the higher plane; to invest and invest, with keener avarice, that he may spend in spiritual creation, and not in augmenting animal existence. Nor is the…

When you start working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas—all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, on…

We would rather be ruined than changed We would rather die in our dread Than climb the cross of the moment And let our illusions die. –W.H. Auden, Epilogue to The Age of Anxiety (1947) I came acros…

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” –Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias (1818) I wrote yesterday about a work-in-progress that I was calling Ozyman…

The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it. –Wendell Berry, Standing by Wor…

If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance. –Samuel Johnson…

The higher aims of “technological progress” are money and ease. And this exalted greed for money and ease is disguised and justified by an obscure, cultish faith in “the future.” — Wendell Berry, O…

Why Bother Because right now there is                      someone Out there with a wound                                                            in the exact shape   ……

One’s destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things. –Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (1957) A changing perspective. Maybe that is th…

Art alleviates the ills of life by showing us the eternal and universal behind the transitory and the individual. Spinoza was right: “in so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect it pa…

The tools which would teach men their own use would be beyond price. –Plato, The Republic (380 BC) This line comes from a section of Plato’s The Republic where he describes Socra…

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives might be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beaut…

I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it’s ripe; it will be exquisite by September. –Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: 1888-1912 Well, it is September now. Got around to…

When things are baffling they usually don’t unbaffle themselves. There’s just, you know, a certain amount of baffling stuff that always, like, really baffles you, and I’ve found t…

Every morning when I wake up I burn my fingers on the pot Toast is cold and the juice is hot I should start over but you know I’d rather not Same thing again Cause that’s the bag…

The birds are singing in your eyes today Sweet flowers blossom in your smile The wind and sun are in the words you say “Where might your lonesome lover be?” Birds may be singing in my e…

The artist should not only paint what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him. If, however, he sees nothing within him, then he should desist from painting what he sees before him &#82…

Lines slip easily down the accustomed grooves. The old designs are copied so glibly that we are half inclined to think them original, save for that very glibness. –Virginia Woolf,  A Letter t…

How sweet it would be to live in society if the exterior appearance was always an image of the heart’s tendencies, if decency were virtue, and if our maxims were our rules of action. –J…

Alice sighed wearily. “I think you might do something better with the time,” she said, “than wasting it in asking riddles with no answers.” “If you knew Time as well a…

Listen and learn. Time is divided into two rivers: one flows backward, devouring life already lived; the other moves forward with you exposing your life. For a single second they may be joined. Now…

Across the sea to an island Where the bridges brightly burn So far away from my land The valley of the unconcerned I was walking down the road, man Just looking at my shoes When God sent me an ange…

When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space that I occupy, and even that which I see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces…

I have a firm belief in this now, not only in terms of my own experience, but in knowing the experiences of other people. When you follow your bliss, and by bliss, I mean the deep sense of being in…

As machines become more and more efficient and perfect, so it will become clear that imperfection is the greatness of man. —Ernst Fischer, An Opposing Man (1969) I’ve wondered about the concept of …

Self is. Self is body and bodily perception. Self is thought, memory, belief. Self creates. Self destroys. Self learns, discovers, becomes. Self shapes. Self adapts. Self invents its own rea…

Far more disturbing than any spook house at an amusement park is a ride through the old hometown if you’ve been away for years. –Jonathan Carroll, The Marriage of Sticks (2012) Like car…