It's about gardening in tight spaces. It's about how to live in a tiny apartment with a tiny terrace. It's about friends, and inspiration and blackspot on the roses. It's about food and cooking over an open flame. It's about wine. And water. And watering...And picnics. It's about Brooklyn. And South Africa. It's about seasons without and within. It's about where I go and what I come back to: a terrace twelve-and-a-half by five-and-a-half feet wide.
We have art, Nietzsche said, so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.
Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero
The garden paths were lit by coloured lamps, as is the custom in Italy, and the supper table was laden with candles and flowers, as is the custom in all countries where they understand how to dress a table, which when properly done is the rarest of all luxuries.
Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
Afterwards in the street, she looks around the neighborhood. "Yes, it is certified now."
She refers to a phenomenon of moviegoing which I have called certification. Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere."
The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.
George Eliot, Middlemarch
One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts - just mere thoughts - are as powerful as electric batteries, as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison.
Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
“Keep watching."
Norman Parkinson, via Grace Coddington.
"A is for dining Alone...and so am I, if a choice must be made between most people I know and myself. This misanthropic attitude is one I am not proud of, but it is firmly there, based on my ever-increasing conviction that sharing food with another human being is an act that should not be indulged in lightly."
MFK Fisher, The Art of Eating
(Mrs Cadwallader to Dorothea)
"I know it's a great temptation to go mad, but don't go in for it, you wouldn't like it."
George Eliot, Middlemarch
The Frontier in the Sky
The Manhattan Skyscraper is born in installments between 1900 and 1910. It represents the fortuitous meeting of three distinct urbanistic breakthroughs that, after relatively independent lives, converge to form a single mechanism: 1. the reproduction of the World; 2. the annexation of the Tower; 3. the block alone.
Rem Koolhaas, delirious new york
I was planning on writing about a woman for 50 years. I will never be competent enough to do so, but at some point you have to try.
What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran with them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.
Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
Ek is 'n man met blombehoeftes.
Petra Muller, Verbeel Jou Nou Dit
"Die kierie kom uit Indonisie, gesny van 'n tak wat van jongs af omslinger was deur a wildevy se rank. Hulle het saam grootgeword, en die rank het sy spoor op die tak gelos. Daarom is die slinger ook oneweredig, en hier,"se hy, "by die punt van die kierie moes daar iets gebeur het - die slinger en die tak het inmekaar gevleg en 'n knoop gemaak. Die natuur het die kierie so gemaak."
"n Kieriemaker sou dit eweredig gedoen het," se ek.
"My kind," se meneer Boje, "vermy die reguit lyn."
Petra Muller, Koendoes
Richard Chaston (1620-1695). Chaston wrote that men and fairies both contain within them a faculty of reason and a faculty of magic. In men reason is strong and magic is weak. With fairies it is the other way round: magic comes very naturally to them, but by human standards they are barely sane.
3 comments:
That rose is remarkable!
I also have a faithful little apricot-coloured patio rose that produced one final bloom long after it was meant to have stopped. Such a treat!
nice
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