I wish you all a lot of travels in 2009!

To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.
Freya Stark

The Essence

What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things...
it is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface.
Constantin Brancusi

Merry Christmas!

It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child Himself.
Charles Dickens

To obey in silence

Anybody can rebel. But to obey in silence, an inner calling to search lifelong without impatience for the means of expression adequate to us... that is much more difficult."
Georges Rouault

Au pays qui te ressemble, In a country you remind me of

Les soleils mouillés
De ces ciels brouillés
Pour mon esprit ont les charmes
Si mystérieux
De tes traîtres yeux,
Brillant à travers leurs larmes.

Charming in the dawn
There, the half-withdrawn
Drenched, mysterious sun appears
In the curdled skies,
Treacherous as your eyes
Shining from behind their tears.

Charles Baudelaire, from L'invitation au voyage
(lovely and brave translation by Edna St. Vincent Millay)

Stretched

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Aim for the impossible

If you can do it then why do it?
Gertrude Stein

From a poem..

The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve.
On their blotter of fog the trees
Seem a botanical drawing.
Memories growing, ring on ring,
A series of weddings.

Sylvia Plath, from Winter trees

A bit of spring in these cold days...

The Amen of nature is always a flower.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

...and a bit of summer

Heat
by Hilda Doolittle

O wind, rend open the heat,
cut apart the heat,
rend it to tatters.

Fruit cannot drop
through this thick air--
fruit cannot fall into heat
that presses up and blunts
the points of pears
and rounds the grapes.

Cut the heat--
plough through it,
turning it on either side
of your path.

Charming decay

Autumn wins you best by this, its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay.
Robert Browning

A painting and a poem

Landscape With The Fall Of Icarus
by William Carlos Williams


According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

Silence painted over

A painter paints his pictures on canvas. But musicians paint pictures on silence.
Leopold Stokowski

The river We cannot cross

Promised Land
by Samuel Menashe

At the edge
Of a world
Beyond my eyes
Beautiful
I know Exile
Is always
Green with hope —
The river
We cannot cross
Flows forever

Trouble

If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it round. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't embrace trouble; that's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

The benefit of seeing

This benefit of seeing... can come only if you pause a while, extricate yourself from the maddening mob of quick impressions ceaselessly battering our lives, and look thoughtfully at a quiet image... the viewer must be willing to pause, to look again, to meditate.
Dorothea Lange

Separation
by W. S. Merwin

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

A movie quote

Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I'm a dog chasing cars.
I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it.
Joker, from The Dark Knight

Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.
Paul Valery

A good definition..

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
Robert Frost

..and some poetry

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.

Margaret Atwood, from Variation on the Word Sleep

The Treasure
by Rupert Brooke

When colour goes home into the eyes,
And lights that shine are shut again,
With dancing girls and sweet birds' cries
Behind the gateways of the brain;
And that no-place which gave them birth, shall close
The rainbow and the rose:—

Still may Time hold some golden space
Where I'll unpack that scented store
Of song and flower and sky and face,
And count, and touch, and turn them o'er,
Musing upon them: as a mother, who
Has watched her children all the rich day through,
Sits, quiet-handed, in the fading light,
When children sleep, ere night.

Discipline

Discipline is not a restriction but an aid to freedom.
It prepares an artist to choose his own limitations...
Wayne Thiebaud

All we know

Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
W. B. Yeats

Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences.
Sylvia Plath

Photographer quote

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
Dorothea Lange

Soul parts

Poor artist!
You gave away part of your soul when you painted the picture which you are now trying to dispose of.
Paul Gauguin

Obsession

A sculptor is a person obsessed with the form and shape of things.
Henry Moore

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
Dorothy Parker

Dreams die too

A Dream Lies Dead
by Dorothy Parker

A dream lies dead here. May you softly go
Before this place, and turn away your eyes,
Nor seek to know the look of that which dies
Importuning Life for life. Walk not in woe,
But, for a little, let your step be slow.
And, of your mercy, be not sweetly wise
With words of hope and Spring and tenderer skies.
A dream lies dead; and this all mourners know:

Whenever one drifted petal leaves the tree-
Though white of bloom as it had been before
And proudly waitful of fecundity-
One little loveliness can be no more;
And so must Beauty bow her imperfect head
Because a dream has joined the wistful dead!

A carpet made of dreams

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

Fiery colors begin their yearly conquest of the hills, propelled by the autumn winds. Fall is the artist.
Takayuki Ikkaku

Seven random things

My friend Cécile asked me to reveal 7 things about me. So here they are:

I am a sculptor and i work mostly in stone. Stone fascinates me.
I have used to love figurative sculpture, but lately i've started working abstract things.
I like to work outside, and i always do except when it's too cold in winter.
I'm left handed.
I have an older brother and a younger sister.
I like big cities.
I like Paris and France a lot, french language and culture. Je parle un petit peu...

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you; Don't go back to sleep.
Rumi

Love arrived

Delay
by Elizabeth Jennings

The radiance of the star that leans on me
Was shining years ago. The light that now
Glitters up there my eyes may never see,
And so the time lag teases me with how

Love that loves now may not reach me until
Its first desire is spent. The star's impulse
Must wait for eyes to claim it beautiful
And love arrived may find us somewhere else.

In the long run

Experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you.
Katherine Anne Porter

Understanding confusion

In Broken Images
by Robert Graves

He is quick, thinking in clear images;
I am slow, thinking in broken images.

He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;
I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images.

Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;
Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.

Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact;
Questioning their relevance, I question their fact.

When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;
when the fact fails me, I approve my senses.

He continues quick and dull in his clear images;
I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.

He in a new confusion of his understanding;
I in a new understanding of my confusion.

From a movie

Randomness is very difficult to achieve... organization always merges back if you don't pay attention.
Science des rêves (2006)

Friendship

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value;
rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
C. S. Lewis

Fragile

Un rêve intact est une merveille fragile.
A dream intact is a fragile marvel.
Edouard Estaunié

From a poem

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
...
Sylvia Plath (Mad Girl's Love Song)

The passage we did not take

Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage which we did not take,
towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden.
T. S. Eliot

Capture the moment

A sonnet is a moment's monument,
Memorial from the Soul's eternity
To one dead deathless hour.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti

(This quote came across my mind while i was looking at the beautiful photo on Luisa's blog, at her Cloud flying over the ocean.)

The madness of art

We work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
Henry James

Once you decide

Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

A day infected with a dream

A lost but happy dream may shed its light upon our waking hours, and the whole day may be infected with the gloom of a dreary or sorrowful one; yet of neither may we be able to recover a trace.
Walter de la Mare

Understanding poetry

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.
Carl Sandburg

I want to be all that I am capable of becoming.
Katherine Mansfield

A dream

La lune est le rêve du soleil.
The moon is a dream of sun.
Klee

The earth laughs in flowers.
E.E.Cummings