Oscar Wilde

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better.
-Oscar Wilde

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.
-Oscar Wilde

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
-Oscar Wilde

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.
-Oscar Wilde

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.
-Oscar Wilde

I can resist everything except temptation.
-Oscar Wilde

A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally.
-Oscar Wilde

Winter Apples

I love to go to the orchard and gather abandoned apples in my painting apron and eat them while sitting under the apple tree in the bare sunshine. Lily loves them too.

Family of Gray Cats

I returned to the cemetery on my walk with Lily. Two of the long-haired gray cats were huddled behind the cemetery garage, and a very curious and bold squirrel was watching to see if I was going to put more cat food out. One cat ran away, but I was able to pick up the other one. I tried to put her in my canvas bag as Lily was barking. The cat crawled up my head, jumped down, and ran to the dead tree on the cliff over the road. I grabbed her and clutched her to my chest, determined to rescue her. Lily was fine once we were walking, and the cat was okay but meowing. We walked the mile back to my house. The cat was happy to hang out in the cat carrier in the living room, curled up on a towel and sitting in the sun.

I took Lily back out and looked for the other two cats. Lily sniffed in the storm drain and got her nose bopped by a cat's claw. There was a drop of blood on her cheek among her whiskers. She didn't bark, but the mother cat, hiding in the storm drain, was hissing. I looked and spotted the other cat near a groundhog hole. I reached for her and she ran into the hole. Duh! I knew I wouldn't be able to get them out. The sun was setting, and they were now safe and relatively warm. I poured cat kibble into the groundhog hole and the storm drain. The dish of water was still out. I'll bring more food and check on them again today. I know that squirrel will be waiting.

John O'Donohue

May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder.
-John O'Donohue

Our Light

It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
-Marianne Williamson

Black White Blue Gray

My favorite cow Blue is in the maternity barn at Wright's Dairy Farm. She is all white with a specked blue-black neck and black eyeliner and black nostrils. We visited her and noticed she has black eyebrows that look drawn on, just like MFK Fisher's on the back of her book Long Ago in France. All seven of the maternity barn cows were lying down waiting to have their calves.

On our walk with Lily through the cemetery yesterday afternoon we spotted a family of gray long-haired cats huddled in the doorway of the Berard mausoleum. They must have just been dropped off. When we got home I called all of the local cat rescues, but there were no takers. Around 6PM I called Marissa, who manages Countryside Vet Clinic in Wrentham. She met me on my street and we drove through the cemetery slowly. It was dark and cold. In the headlights I saw one of the gray kittens walk over and curl up under a bush. The cat was friendly and sweet and didn't mind being picked up and held. She was shivering. She didn't even mind being placed in my large green cat carrier. I'll bet these cats were apartment cats and had never been outside their whole lives. We did not find any of the others; I hope they're okay. I will look for them today in the daylight. This one is now safe and warm at the vet clinic. Bill calls her Berard.

John Cage

When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic—here on Sixth Avenue, for instance—I don't have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound [...] I don't need sound to talk to me.
-John Cage

It was at Harvard not quite forty years ago that I went into an anechoic [totally silent] chamber not expecting in that silent room to hear two sounds: one high, my nervous system in operation, one low, my blood in circulation. The reason I did not expect to hear those two sounds was that they were set into vibration without any intention on my part. That experience gave my life direction, the exploration of nonintention. No one else was doing that. I would do it for us. I did not know immediately what I was doing, nor, after all these years, have I found out much. I compose music. Yes, but how? I gave up making choices. In their place I put the -asking of questions. The answers come from the mechanism, not the wisdom of the I Ching, the most ancient of all books: tossing three coins six times yielding numbers between 1 and 64.
-John Cage, 1990

If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.
-John Cage.

The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.
-John Cage

Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?
-John Cage

As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.
-John Cage

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.
-John Cage

Ideas are one thing and what happens is another.
-John Cage

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of "culture."
-John Cage

It's useless to play lullabies for those who cannot sleep.
-John Cage

The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation.
-John Cage

There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.
-John Cage

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
-John Cage

We are involved in a life that passes understanding and our highest business is our daily life.
-John Cage

We carry our homes within us which enables us to fly.
-John Cage

We need not destroy the past. It is gone.
-John Cage

Frances Moore Lappé

I've grown certain that the root of all fear is that we've been forced to deny who we are.
-Frances Moore Lappé

My whole mission in life is to help us find the power we lack to create the world we want.
-Frances Moore Lappé

The act of putting into your mouth what the earth has grown is perhaps your most direct interaction with the earth.
-Frances Moore Lappé

Hope is not what we find in evidence. It is what we become in action.
-Frances Moore Lappé

Recent science shows that when we observe an action it affects our brains, via "mirror neurons," as if we ourselves were acting. It literally changes us. So, in a basic sense, seeing courage in action can actually makes us braver . . . one person's courage has such unpredictable power.
-Frances Moore Lappé

Loretta LaRoche

This Thanksgiving celebrate the now of chow! Lets take ourselves a little less seriously and lighten up!
-Loretta LaRoche

Peace Happens

Peace happens one meal, one song and one story at a time.

Friends

Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
-Abraham Lincoln

Scattershot

I just got Scattershot A memoir of my bipolar family by David Lovelace from library. An amazing book. The author is also a poet.

Coffee

I've discovered I LOVE generic coffee! Stop and Shop breakfast blend for 2.99 a can, the Tetley Tea equivalent of coffee. Sadly, I can't enjoy tea anymore. For some reason (histamine allergies?) it tumbles my tummy. But I am lovin' simple coffee - no sugar and skim milk so you can taste the coffee. I told Bill it's the kind they make at McDonald's, Burger King, all gas stations, and all the Cub Scout & PTA & AA meetings. What some people call bad boring coffee I love!!! To me it tastes like hot cocoa but better because it's not sugary.

Anne Tyler

For me, writing something down was the only road out.
-Anne Tyler

What I hope for from a book - either one that I write or one that I read - is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don't want to think of the writer.
-Anne Tyler

I've always thought a hotel ought to offer optional small animals. I mean a cat to sleep on your bed at night, or a dog of some kind to act pleased when you come in. You ever notice how a hotel room feels so lifeless?
-Anne Tyler

If I waited till I felt like writing, I'd never write at all.
-Anne Tyler

In real life I avoid all parties altogether, but on paper I can mingle with the best of them.
-Anne Tyler

I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get.

-Anne Tyler

It's true that writing is a solitary occupation, but you would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer once you get to know them.
-Anne Tyler

I write because I want more than one life; I insist on a wider selection. It’s greed, plain and simple. When my characters join the circus, I’m joining the circus. Although I’m happily married, I spent a great deal of time mentally living with incompatible husbands.
-Anne Tyler

Coffee

Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and as sweet as love.

-Turkish Proverb

Word Salad

I love this term...word salad...it's a psych term.

Word salad is a mixture of random words that, while arranged in phrases that appear to give them meaning, actually carry no significance. A famous example is Noam Chomsky's phrase, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously". People who suffer from this affliction attempt to communicate their idea, but the random words come out instead. Often, the person is unaware that he or she did not make sense.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_salad

Poetry?

Marianne Moore

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.

-Marianne Moore

Thich Nhat Hanh

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child -- our own two eyes. All is a miracle.
-Thich Nhat Hanh

Henri Nouwen

The man who can articulate the movements of his inner life, who can give names to his varied experiences, need no longer be a victim of himself, but he is able slowly and consistently to remove the obstacles that prevent the spirit from entering.
-Henri Nouwen, The Wounded Healer

Thich Nhat Hanh

Everyday we do things, we are things that have to do with peace. If we are aware of our life..., our way of looking at things, we will know how to make peace right in the moment, we are alive.
-Thich Nhat Hanh

Keeping your body healthy is an expression of gratitude to the whole cosmos - the trees, the clouds, everything.
-Thich Nhat Hanh

People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.
-Thich Nhat Hanh

The practice of peace and reconciliation is one of the most vital and artistic of human actions.
-Thich Nhat Hanh

Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.
-Thich Nhat Hanh

Smiling is very important. If we are not able to smile, then the world will not have peace. It is not by going out for a demonstration against nuclear missiles that we can bring about peace.It is with our capacity of smiling, breathing, and being peace that we can make peace.
-Thich Nhat Hanh

If in our daily life we can smile, if we can be peaceful and happy, not only we, but everyone will profit from it. This is the most basic kind of peace work.
-Thich Nhat Hanh

We must not be attached to a view or a doctrine, even a Buddhist one. . . The Buddha said that if in a certain moment or place you adopt something as the absolute truth, and you attach to that, then you will no longer have any chance to reach the truth.
-Thich Nhat Hanh

Even when the truth comes and knocks on your door, and asks you to open the door, you won't recognize it. So you must not be too attached to dogma--to what you believe, and to what you perceive.
-Thich Nhat Hanh

You who are journalists, writers, citizens, you have the right and duty to say to those you have elected that they must practice mindfulness, calm and deep listening, and loving speech. This is a universal thing, taught by all religions.
-Thich Nhat Hanh