“The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.”
―
Travel Photography
Ireland, a photograph
“The heart of an Irishman is nothing but his imagination”
―
99, a photograph
“If you’re in the luckiest one per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent.”
– Warren Buffett
Fellows, a photograph
“Only when a person reaches old age can he stop caring about the opinions of his fellows, or of the public, or of the future.”
– Milan Kundera
Good sea, a photograph
“I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea– do I have to choose between the two?”
– David Byrne
Here, a photograph
“The world is quiet here.”
– Lemony Snicket
Floods, a photograph
“The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.”
– Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Art, a photograph
“In the history of art there are periods when bread seems so beautiful that it nearly gets into museums.” Janet Flanner, Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1933
Intellect, a photograph
“The acquisition of knowledge is always of use to the intellect, because it may thus drive out useless things and retain the good. For nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known.”
– Leonardo da Vinci
Sculpture by Tony Cragg, Skulpturenpark Walkfrieden, Germany
One’s entire life, a photograph
“How concrete everything becomes in the world of the spirit when an object, a mere door, can give images of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome and respect. If one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one would like to re-open, one would have to tell the story of one’s entire life.”
– Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Work, a photograph
“A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.”
― Leo Tolstoy
All we might, a photograph
“The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.”
— Alain de Botton
Good at heart, a photograph
“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
― Anne Frank
Candy, a photograph
“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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
Latency, A Photograph
“Who knows whether, if I had given up smoking, I should really have become the strong perfect man I imagined? Perhaps it was this very doubt that bound me to my vice, because life is so much pleasanter if one is able to believe in one’s own latent greatness”
― Italo Svevo
Fire, A Photograph
“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”
Gustav Mahler
The Slip, A Photograph
“What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing, when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men?”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
Gently, A Photograph
“When you leave,
weary of me,
without a word I shall gently let you go.”
― Kim Sowol, Poet
One Street Shy 