“Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun of eating it all over again.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
Author: One Street Shy
Tiny, a photograph
“Once we lose our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe which dwarfs — in time, in space, and in potential — the tiny anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot
Guitar, a photograph
“The guitar is a miniature orchestra in itself.”
― Ludwig van Beethoven
Technological sublime, a photograph
“For thousands of years, it had been nature–and its supposed creator–that had had a monopoly on awe. It had been the icecaps, the deserts, the volcanoes and the glaciers that had given us a sense of finitude and limitation and had elicited a feeling in which fear and respect coagulated into a strangely pleasing feeling of humility, a feeling which the philosophers of the eighteenth century had famously termed the sublime.
But then had come a transformation to which we were still the heirs…. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the dominant catalyst for that feeling of the sublime had ceased to be nature. We were now deep in the era of the technological sublime when awe could most powerfully be invoked not by forests or icebergs but by supercomputers, rockets and particle accelerators. We were now almost exclusively amazed by ourselves.”
― Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
Creative, a photograph of life
“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that
without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.”
― Pearl S. Buck
Reds, a photograph of Rome
“Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Yellows, a photograph of Roma
“Life is for the living.
Death is for the dead.
Let life be like music.
And death a note unsaid.”
― Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems
Arrangement, a photograph
“Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it.”
― Rollo May, The Cry for Myth
Together, on a lazy Saturday afternoon, one experiences the warmth of the sun on his face, the other the warmth of the phone in her hands.
Art, a photograph of the MAXXI Gallery
“Architecture is the alpha principle of all arts.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Today I visited the MAXXI gallery for the Letizia Battaglia exhibit. The oddly out-of-place modern exterior architecture of the MAXXI aside, the interior exhibit space is superb. And as a lover of photography and photo-journalism, I cannot recommend the exhibit enough. I must’ve spent at least three hours in awe at her work, not only in photographs, but her publishing house dedicated solely to women writers.
No matter what, a photograph
“No matter what happens, always keep your childhood innocence. It’s the most important thing.”
― Federico Fellini
People, a photograph
“Religion. It’s given people hope in a world torn apart by religion.”
― Jon Stewart
Off the track, a photograph of Rome
“Remember that it’s only by going off the track that you get to know the country…And don’t let me beg you, go with that awful tourist idea that Italy’s only a museum of antiquities and art. Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvelous than the land.”
― E.M. Forster
I’m in Rome visiting my dear friend and editor while working on my book. Between writing and editing, I try to find some time each day to get out and about to both walk and photograph.
Strange contrasts, A photograph of Rome
“It is a place that ‘grows upon you’ every day. There seems to be always something to find out in it. There are the most extraordinary alleys and by-ways to walk about in. You can lose your way (what a comfort that is, when you are idle!) twenty times a day if you like; and turn up again, under the most unexpected and surprising difficulties. It abounds in the strangest contrasts; things that are picturesque, ugly, mean, magnificent, delightful, and offensive, break upon the view at every turn.”
― Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy
The Beginning, A Photograph of Rome
“Tell me about
your Italian journey
I am not ashamed
I wept in that country
beauty touched me
I was a child once more
in the womb of that country
I wept
I am not ashamed
I have tried to return to paradise”
― Tadeusz Różewicz, They Came to See a Poet: Selected Poems
Up ‘n down, A Photograph
Up ‘n down
Ferris wheel
Tell me how does it feel
To be so high…
Looking down here
Is it lonely?
-Norah Jones
Roots, A Photograph
“You can’t hate the roots of a tree and not hate the tree.”
― Malcolm X
Leonard’s Ocean
“If you don’t become the ocean, you’ll be seasick every day.”
― Leonard Cohen (R.I.P.)
Inner fire, a photograph
“The inner fire is the most important thing mankind possesses.”
― Edith Södergran, poetess
Anybody, a photograph
“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”
― Virginia Woolf
Deviation, a photograph
“Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.”
― Frank Zappa
Undramatic, a photograph
Architecture, even at its most accomplished, will only ever constitute a small, and imperfect (expensive, prone to destruction, and morally unreliable), protest against the state of things. More awkwardly still, architecture asks us to imagine that happiness might often have an unostentatious, unheroic character to it, that it might be found in a run of old floorboards or in a wash of morning light over a plaster wall—in undramatic, frangible scenes of beauty that move us because we are aware of the darker backdrop against which they are set.”
― Alain de Botton
Here, a photograph
“You may say to yourself: “Well, how did I get here?”
— David Byrne
5’s, A Photograph
“Even when she had to make some one a present of the kind called ‘useful,’ when she had to give an armchair or some table-silver or a walking-stick, she would choose ‘antiques,’ as though their long desuetude had effaced from them any semblance of utility and fitted them rather to instruct us in the lives of the men of other days than to serve the common requirements of our own.”
― Marcel Proust
They are a-changin, A Photograph
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
– Bob Dylan
Dee, A Photograph
“If you think we’re waxworks,” he said, “you ought to pay, you know. Waxworks weren’t made to be looked at for nothing. Nohow!”
“Contrariwise,” added the one marked ‘DEE’, “if you think we’re alive, you ought to speak.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
Bicycle bicycle bicycle, A Photograph
Bicycle bicycle bicycle
I want to ride my bicycle bicycle bicycle
I want to ride my bicycle
I want to ride my bike
I want to ride my bicycle
I want to ride it where I like
-Queen
Or not to be, A Photograph
“To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and, by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub.”
― William Shakespeare
Most Agreeable, A Photograph
“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
I can generally be guilty of ignoring life.
Understanding, A Photograph
“Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me…”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
Naïveté, A Photograph
“Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.”
― Steve Martin
One Street Shy 