"I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do." -Willa Cather

"But no more of this blubbering now,
we are a going a-whaling,
and there is plenty of yet to come. 
Let us scrape the ice from our frosted feet,
and see what sort of place this "Spouter" may be."  Herman Melville, Moby Dick

"Give my feet to the footloose
Careless, fancy free
Give my knees to the needy
Don't pull that stuff on me
Hand me down my walking cane
It's a sin to tell a lie
Send my mouth way down south
And kiss my ass goodbye" -John Prine

"A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men."  -Roald Dahl

"From the dark end of the street - To the bright side of the road - We'll be lovers once again on the bright side of the road."  -Van Morrison

"When does the butterfly read
what flies written on its wings?
So it can understand its itinerary,
which letters does the bee know?
And with which numbers does the ant
subtract its dead soldiers?
What are cylclones called
when they stand still?"  -P. Neruda


"Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what." -W.B Yeats

"Come fool be patient;  life is not logic." -Robinson Jeffers

2008

"He had kicked himself loose of the earth.  Confound the man! he had kicked the very earth to pieces.  He was alone, and I before him did not know whether I stood on the ground or floated in the air."   -Joseph Conrad

"How blind and unreasoning
and arbitrary are some of the laws of nature
--most of them in fact!"
-Mark Twain

"A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory."   -S.T. Coleridge

"Bent as you are from straining
against the bitter horizontals of
a north wind, -- there below you
how easily the long yellow notes
of poplars flow upward in a descending
scale, each note secure in its own
posture-- singularly woven." - from W.C. Williams' Trees

"Call me Ishmael. Some years ago -- never mind how long precisely -- having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world." -Herman Melville

"I'll walk where my own nature would be leading: It vexes me to choose another guide."  -E. Bronte

"Asshole of the Universe into which I disappear-- Elastic Hand that spoke

     Crane-- Music that passes into the phonograph of years from another

     Millienium-- Ear of the buildings of NY--

That which I believe-- have seen-- seek endlessly in leaf dog eye-- fault

     always, lack--  which makes me think--

Desire that created me, Desire hid my body, Desire all Man know

     Death, Desire surpassing the Babylonian possible world"  from Ginsberg's Magic Psalm

"Nature is the art of God" -Dante

"We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."  -A. Leopold

"I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling." -The Dharma Bums, Kerouac

"Wanna fly you got to give up the shit that weighs you down."  -Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison

"We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;

We must unhumanize our views a little, and become

     confident

As the rock and ocean that we were made from."

-R. Jeffers

"But I'll wager it never happens.  I'll wager at the very end a body realizes the Lord has already shown Himself.  That things as they are"-

"Just what they've always seen, was seeing Him.  As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes."

-Buddy's friend from "A Christmas Memory" by T. Capote.

"The apostle Thomas said he would not believe until he saw,

and when he saw, he said:  "My Lord and my God!"

Was it a miracle that made him believe?  Most likely not.

He believed only because he wanted to believe, and possibly he already believed

in the secret recesses of his being while he was saying, "Except I shall see,

I will not believe.""   -Dostoevsky

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We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel;

But it is on the space where there is nothing

That the usefulness of the wheel depends.

We turn clay to make a vessel;

But it is on the space where there is nothing

That the usefulness of the vessel depends.

We pierce doors and windows to make a house;

And it is on these spaces where there is nothing

That the usefulness of the house depends.

Therefore just as we take advantage of what is,

We should recognize the usefulness of what is not.

-Lao Tzu