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#1

“Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

tags: alice-in-wonderland, breakfast, carroll

5419 likes

#2

“You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.”
― Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

tags: inspiration, life, whimsy

1527 likes

#3

“Her father showed her the Himalayan yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, the Patagonian giant sloth. There was the Irish elk with antles as big as wings. The South African quagga, which started as a zebra until it ran out of stripes and became a horse. The great auk, the lion-tailed monkey, the Queensland tiger. So many incredible extra creatures in the world, and nobody had found a single one of them.
"Do you think they're real?" she said.
Her father nodded. "I have begun to feel comforted," he said, "by the thought of all we do not know, which is nearly everything.”
― Rachel Joyce, Miss Benson's Beetle

tags: believing

1 likes

#4

“I like the idea of songs sung by those without big voices. You know, small birdsongs that rise above the noise of the city.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

tags: birds, singing-with-your-heart, small-things

13 likes

#5

“It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

tags: death

8202 likes

#6

“Not every star is like the étoile polar, chérie. Some are more elusive, more subtle. But they are no less brilliant, no less important.”
― Kerri Maher, The Paris Bookseller

tags: brilliant, light, star

3 likes

#7

“Why do you think women are designed to outlive men? Why do we keep going for thirty years after our bodies can no longer reproduce? Do you think nature meant for those years to be useless? No, of course not. Our lives are designed to have three parts. The first is education. The second, creation. And in part three, we put our experience to use and protect those who are weaker.”
― Kirsten Miller, The Change

30 likes

#8

“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

tags: art, arts-and-humanities, creative-process, writing

4428 likes

#9

“Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

107 likes

#10

“Even if you don’t believe in it, I do. Otherwise what’s it all been for?”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

4 likes

#11

“The world as it is is enough.”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

67 likes

#12

“If I were flying, I would travel to a perfect place. A place with frosted cakes and beautiful flowers and excellent trees to climb and absolutely no doldrums.”
― Kyo Maclear, Virginia Wolf

tags: children, children-s-books, dreams, happiness, imagination, kids-books, perfect, thoughts, travel, virginia-wolf

13 likes

#13

“It is possible too that I was experiencing something known as "anticipatory grief," the mourning that occurs before a certain loss. Anticipatory. Expectatory. Trepidatory. This grief had a dampness. It did not drench or drown me, but it hung in the air like a pallid cloud, thinning but never entirely vanishing. It followed me wherever I went and gradually I grew used to looking at the world through it.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

15 likes

#14

“We're all just walking each other home.”
― Ram Dass

1110 likes

#15

“Thorstein Veblen would say people hate squirrels, she called up to him, "because that's the only way to motivate expenditure on them - such as buying traps or guns. It's the same with stirring up patriotic emotionalism, because it justifies expenditures for defense.”
― Elizabeth Mckenzie, The Portable Veblen

4 likes

#16

“Do you think wishful thinking is a psychiatric condition?”
― Elizabeth Mckenzie, The Portable Veblen

tags: mental-illness, optimism, wishful-thinking

2 likes

#17

“The Flying squirrel flies, and the Irksome squirrel irks. The Spinning squirrel spins and the Smirking squirrel smirks. The Crapulous craps and the Lurking lurks; But when the Talking squirrel talks, none but a Listening Human works.”
― Elizabeth Mckenzie, The Portable Veblen

2 likes

#18

“If you love it enough, anything will talk with you.” —G. W. CARVER”
― Elizabeth Mckenzie, The Portable Veblen

1 likes

#19

“Veblen, you may not know it now, but marriage affects everything that happens to you. Your mate becomes the mirror in which you see yourself. If he doesn't see you as a beautiful pearl, you'll wither.”
― Elizabeth Mckenzie, The Portable Veblen

tags: love, marriage, relationships, respect

1 likes

#20

“Are you committed to having a really strange life?"

She laughed. "Probably. What do you mean?”
― Elizabeth Mckenzie, The Portable Veblen

tags: eccentrics, life, oddness, strangeness

1 likes

#21

“The birders I encountered in books and in the world shared little in common except this simple secret: if you listen to birds, every day will have a song in it.”
― Kyo Maclear

tags: art, birds, life, song

10 likes

#22

“Or maybe I discovered something more fundamental: worry is a constriction. A mind narrows when it has too much to bear. Art is not born of unwanted constriction. Art wants formless and spacious quiet, anti-social daydreaming, time away from the consumptive volume of everyday life.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

tags: anxiety, art, creativity, life, mindfulness, worry

7 likes

#23

“If the wind is going the right way, some birds like to spread their wings and hang in the air, appearing not to move a bit. It is a subtle skill, to remain appreciably steady amid the forces of drift and gravity, to be neither rising nor falling.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

tags: birds, flight

5 likes

#24

“On the satisfactions of small birds and small art and the audacity of aiming tiny in an age of big ambitions.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

tags: ambition, freedom, satisfaction, small

5 likes

#25

“I miss someone who gets me. I called a woman on my research team a bitch – you know in a friendly way – and she told me to go to hell. And I think she really meant it.”
“Rhian, we’ve talked about this. Normal people don’t like to be called names. For some reason, they tend to take is personally. And you are a tad bitchy, by the way.
“Normal people are so sensitive.”
― Samantha Young, On Dublin Street

194 likes

#26

“Siesta becomes a ritual. We pull in the shutters, leaving the windows open. All over the house, ladders of light fall across the floor. If I am mad enough to take a walk after one-thirty, no one is out, not even a dog. The word torpor comes to mind. All shops close during the sacred three hours. If you need something for bee sting or allergy, too bad. Siesta is prime time for sex, too. Maybe this accounts for the Mediterranean temperament versus the northern; children conceived in the light and children conceived in the dark.”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy

2 likes

#27

“As Carl Jung put it, “In each of us there is another whom we do not know.” As Pink Floyd sang, “There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me.”
― David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

tags: carl-jung, madness, pink-floyd

25 likes

#28

“He hesitated then, anticipating the panic that came when there was nothing left to read”
― Donna Leon, Earthly Remains

19 likes

#29

“A woman who twirls her hair while speaking is a woman never to be taken seriously”
― Weike Wang, Joan Is Okay

tags: femininity, professionalism, woman, women

3 likes

#30

“The little boy nodded at the peony and the peony seemed to nod back. The little boy was neat, clean and pretty. The peony was unchaste, dishevelled as peonies must be, and at the height of its beauty.(...) Every hour is filled with such moments, big with significance for someone.”
― Robertson Davies, What's Bred in the Bone

tags: beauty, inspiration, meaning, peony, small-things

20 likes

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