The Most Beautiful Things

“Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance.”

– John Steinbeck

A peacock at Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home, Andalusia in Milledgeville, GA.

The Poetry of Solitude

“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous — to poetry.”

– Thomas Mann

When in doubt, tea is always a good companion.

All Writers Need Windows

“I can’t play bridge. I don’t play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn’t seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.” – Alice Munro

Alice Munro, a Canadian author, is one of the greatest writers of our time. She also wrote one of my favorite short stories, “Gravel,” published in The New Yorker last June.

The house behind my house, where ivy clings to the fading paint, and you can look out the window, but not in.

Of Monsters and Marvels

“Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.”
-Francisco de Goya

Monster or marvel? I found this beast while wandering around Athens, GA.

 

Nothing But Vegetables

“A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.” – Gertrude Stein

I went to the Farmer’s Market this morning. Everything was bright and fresh. But these are only vegetables. Vegetables get eaten.

Baudelaire: Your New Weekend Wingman

“It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.” – Charles Baudelaire

Dashing fellow, isn’t he?