mohammed

Don't tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you traveled.

[image via here]

antoine de saint-exupéry

You alone will have the stars as no one else has them. In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night. You - only you - will have stars that can laugh.

[image via tete perdue]

dennis lehane

Your first family is your blood family and you always be true to that. That means something. But there’s another family and that’s the kind you go out and find. Maybe even by accident sometimes. And they’re as much blood as your first family. Maybe more so, because they don’t have to look out for you and they don’t have to love you. They choose to.

oscar wilde

Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about things. What we like is to be a man’s last romance.

the art of racing in the rain

Sara Gruen, author of one of my favorite books, wrote the following about Garth Steins' best-seller:

The Art of Racing in the Rain has everything: love, tragedy, redemption, danger, and best of all, the canine narrator Enzo. This old soul of a dog has much to teach to us about being human. I loved this book.

One Thursday morning, my boyfriend B picked me up from the airport following an unpleasant evening's worth of travel.  I was jet-lagged and grumpy.  He took me home, put me to bed, and mandated the remainder of my day would be spent catching up on sleep, and only after, reading The Art of Racing in the Rain.  He had placed the book on my pillow, along with a sweet card and a surprise subscription to one of my favorite magazines.  He takes great care of me.

I read several chapters that day but turned through the bulk of it on a beach in the Dominican Republic.  B warned I would cry.  He was wrong though, I didn't just cry.  I sobbed for the last fifty pages, my sunscreened face streaked with salted love for Enzo and for our own yellow lab, Myles.

Post-novel, I have grown increasingly aware of the ways B and I can show Mylie love even when we're not home.  Id est, leaving her in the melodic care of George Winston and Frank Sinatra, or turning on the Racing Channel, Enzo-style.

billy collins

If there is only enough time in the final

minutes of the twentieth century for one last dance

I would like to be dancing it slowly with you,

say, in the ballroom of a seaside hotel.

My palm would press into the small of your back

as the past hundred years collapsed into a pile

of mirrors or buttons or frivolous shoes,

just as the floor of the nineteenth century gave way

and disappeared in a red cloud of brick dust.

There will be no time to order another drink

or worry about what was never said,

not with the orchestra sliding into the sea

and all our attention devoted to humming

whatever it was they were playing.

[Billy Collins, Dancing Toward Bethlehem]

henny youngman

We always hold hands.  If I let go, she shops.

van goethe

We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.

[image via THREAD]

maurice sendak

Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters - sometimes very hastily - but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.

[original maurice sendak art via here]

emily giffin

I love him for his intelligence, his sensitivity, his courage. I love him wholly and unconditionally without reservation. I love him enough to take risks. I love him enough to accept my own happiness and use it, in turn, to make him happy back.

[image via here]

rainer maria rilke

A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity. In this manner of its origin lies its true estimate: there is no other. Therefore, I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths whence your life wells forth; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it as it sounds.

[image via here]

theodore isaac rubin

I must learn to love the fool in me, the one who feels too much, talks too much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries.

[image via here]

chuck klosterman

People who talk about their dreams are actually trying to tell you things about themselves they'd never admit in normal conversation.

[image via here]

me too

Oh I love red.  I'm very loyal to my colors.

Elizabeth Taylor

[image via here]

and speaking of forts

[image via vera vodak]

on art

The following excerpt has changed the way I look at everything. It's also changed the way I look at my gray cube, as a photocopy of page 204 from Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog now hangs on my wall:

But when we gaze at a still life, when - even though we did not pursue it - we delight in its beauty, a beauty borne away by the magnified and immobile figuration of things, we find pleasure in the fact that there was no need for longing, we may contemplate something we need not want, may cherish something we need not desire. So this still life, because it embodies a beauty that speaks to our desire but was given birth by someone else's desire, because it cossets our pleasure without in any way being part of our own projects, because it is offered to us without requiring the effort of desiring on our part: this still life incarnates the quintessence of Art, the certainty of timelessness. In the scene before our eyes - silent, without life or motion - a time exempt of projects is incarnated, perfection purloined from duration and its weary greed - pleasure without desire, existence without duration, beauty without will.

For art is emotion without desire.

[image via here]

andy andrews

Until a person takes responsibility for where he is, there is no basis for moving on. The bad news is that the past was in your hands, but the good news is that the future, my friend, is also in your hands.

Andy Andrews

[image via here]

bob marley

Tonight I've signed myself up for a Bob Marley Friday Night Flow class at Garden State Yoga. The room is candle-lit and Bob Marley music accompanies the practice. I can't think of a better way to start my weekend.

george whitman

Shakespeare & Co. is my idea of the perfect refuge, and while my Parisian affair was brief, I spent a generous amount of time in this warm, affable bookstore just across the Seine from Notre Dame.

The Sundance Channel aired a special on George Whitman, ex-patriot and owner of Shakespeare & Co., entitled Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man. At the end of the documentary, Whitman recites the poem below. I fell in love with his cadence, the serenity in his gaze, the simplicity of that moment he chose to share his poem, the eccentricity of his haircut. I’ve memorized his poem and it’s morphed into mantra of sorts; I catch myself thinking the words without realizing I’m doing so.

Here is my best effort at putting this poem on paper (so to speak). I can't find it in written form, trust me, I've tried:

Among the visions which my fancies trace
There was one brightest star, one face -
One image from afar filled with syruped grace

Each poem is her heart’s fantasy
Each flower and tree is framed within her memory
Each dream, each midnight, and each dawn
Are garments, thoughts of her put on

Each beam of light from the imperial blue
With her in falls the good
The beautiful
The true

okay

Begin anywhere.

- Frank Giampietro

[image via here]