Category Archives: Quote

A Book

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.” -Franz Kafka

I illustrate with one of the incredible worlds of Vladimir Kush.

Imagination

“The imagination is the true fire, stolen from heaven, to animate this cold creature of clay, producing all those fine sympathies that lead to rapture, rendering men social by expanding their hearts, instead of leaving them leisure to calculate how many comforts society affords.”
Mary Wollstonecraft (in a 1794 letter)

Mary Wollstonecraft (27 April 1759 – 10 September 1797) was a British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women’s rights. Until the late 20th century, Wollstonecraft’s life, which encompassed several unconventional personal relationships at the time, received more attention than her writing. Today Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and her works as important influences.

Art – Michael Cheval. Fair use

Out of Africa

“The sky was rarely more than pale blue or violet, with a profusion of mighty, weightless, ever-changing clouds towering up and sailing on it, but it has blue vigour in it, and at a short distance it painted the ranges of hills and the woods a fresh deep blue.”
– from Out Of Africa by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) – born 17 April 1885

Crescent hearts

“Perhaps the crescent moon smiles in doubt at being told that it is a fragment awaiting perfection.” – Rabindranath Tagore

Perhaps we are waxing moons smiling vainly at being told we are about to draw the perfect circle of frightful dreams and bittersweet hope.

Perfection?
To start with a crescent heart that desires deeply to become round one day.

Art by Duy Huynh.

Moonlight

“We feel cold, but we don’t mind it, because we will not come to harm. And if we wrapped up against the cold, we wouldn’t feel other things, like the bright tingle of the stars, or the music of the aurora, or best of all the silky feeling of moonlight on our skin. It’s worth being cold for that.”
Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

Art – Wilfred Jenkins (1857-1936), A Country House by Moonlight