Thursday, April 30, 2009

A poem

The Taxi
by Amy Lowell

When I go away from you
The world beats dead
Like a slackened drum.
I call out for you against the jutted stars
And shout into the ridges of the wind.
Streets coming fast,
One after the other,
Wedge you away from me,
And the lamps of the city prick my eyes
So that I can no longer see your face.
Why should I leave you,
To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night?

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.
Gwendolyn Brooks

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Therefore trust to thy heart, and to what the world calls illusions.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Shared confusion

I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.
Jack Kerouac

Monday, April 20, 2009

From a poem

Scattered in bookstores, greyed by dust and time,
Unseen, unsought, unopened, and unsold,
My poems will be savoured as are rarest wines -
When they are old.
Marina Tsvetaeva

Friday, April 17, 2009

Drawing

Drawing is putting a line (a)round an idea.
Henri Matisse

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Away from witnesses

The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses - behind the lines, in the gym and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights.
Muhammad Ali

Monday, April 13, 2009

Happy Easter!

Each of us makes his own weather, determines the color of the skies in the emotional universe which he inhabits.
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Rationalists

Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses --
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon --
Rationalists would wear sombreros.

Wallace Stevens, from Six Significant Landscapes

Monday, April 6, 2009

Nows

Forever is composed of nows.
Emily Dickinson

Friday, April 3, 2009

Photography

What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
John Berger

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Too fast

Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear end collision.
James Thurber