In the wind

Animals give me more pleasure through the viewfinder of a camera than they ever did in the crosshairs of a gunsight. And after I've finished "shooting," my unharmed victims are still around for others to enjoy. I have developed a deep respect for animals. I consider them fellow living creatures with certain rights that should not be violated any more than those of humans.
~Jimmy Stewart

A wise man once said...

The moment a little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow,
he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing.
~Eric Berne

Crossroads

Alice came to a fork in the road. "Which road do I take?" she asked.
"Where do you want to go?" responded the Cheshire cat.
"I don't know," Alice answered.
"Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter."
~Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Nature's running machines

He knows when you're happy
He knows when you're comfortable
He knows when you're confident
And he always knows when you have carrots.
~Author Unknown

on flowers

Bread feeds the body, indeed, but flowers feed also the soul.
~The Koran

The great escape

People tell me that the countryside must always be stupid and backward, and I get angry,
as if it were said that only townspeople had immortal souls, and that it was only in the city
that the flame of divinity breathed into the first men had an unobscured glow.
~George William Russell

On dogs

The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him
and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.
~Samuel Butler, Notebooks, 1912

creatures, great and small

Because the heart beats under a covering of hair, of fur, feathers, or wings,
it is, for that reason, to be of no account?
~Jean Paul Richter

Zoom zoom

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.
~Robert Louis Stevenson

On vast blue skies

The poetry of the earth is never dead.
~John Keats

A man is his castle

A neurotic is a man who builds a castle in the air.
A psychotic is the man who lives in it.
A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent.
~Jerome Lawrence

A feather for my freedom

God loved the birds and invented trees.
Man loved the birds and invented cages.
~Jacques Deval, Afin de vivre bel et bien

On parenting

Your children need your presence more than your presents.
~Jesse Jackson

Home sweet home

No man but feels more of a man in the world
if he have but a bit of ground that he can call his own.
However small it is on the surface, it is four thousand miles deep;
and that is a very handsome property.
~Charles Dudley Warner

Sweet eccentricity

It's always the badly dressed people who are the most interesting.
~Jean Paul Gaultier

On best friends

A dog is one of the remaining reasons why some people can be persuaded to go for a walk.
~O.A. Battista

Home

Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

On liberty

Freedom is the oxygen of the soul.
~Moshe Dayan

The cat with no hat

There are few things in life more heartwarming than to be welcomed by a cat.
~Tay Hohoff

On the move

The simplest questions are the most profound.
Where were you born? Where is your home?
Where are you going? What are you doing?
Think about these once in a while and watch your answers change.
~Richard Bach

Creature comforts

A house that does not have one worn, comfy chair in it is soulless.
~May Sarton

Setting skies

Weather forecast for tonight: dark.
~George Carlin

Rumbling skies

Weather is a great metaphor for life - sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad,
and there's nothing much you can do about it but carry an umbrella.
~Pepper Giardino

Shelter

For each new morning with its light,
For rest and shelter of the night,
For health and food, for love and friends,
For everything Thy goodness sends.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Orgy of colours

Hard not to smile when feasting your eyes upon such beauties, no?

Where's Waldo?

Hint: the cat's name is Waldo...

Basking magnolias

'Tis a shame that magnolia flowers only bloom for a few days out of the year... I find them fascinating!

Green babies

Mother Nature's little yearly miracles :-)

Rooted sunshine

This lone pretty flower is a poem on a stem.

Ginger snap

Met this little fellow while walking the dogs, he was very happy to give the nice lady a big smile for the camera!

Spring lambs

It's spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you've got it, you want -
oh, you don't quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!
~Mark Twain

Spring = rebirth!

The Bubblegum snapshots are back! Well at least for a while... so do kick back and enjoy daily shots of colour, courtesy of Mother Nature and my faithful old camera. Vive le printemps!

In praise of dogs...

You ask of my companions. Hills, sir, and the sundown,
and a dog as large as myself that my father bought me.
They are better than human beings, because they know but do not tell.
~Emily Dickinson

Success

Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

drifting sideways

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.
~Robert Louis Stevenson

Winter skies wink at me

There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
~Annie Dillard

Loneliness

What shall I do with all the days and hours
That must be counted ere I see thy face?
How shall I charm the interval that lowers
Between this time and that sweet time of grace?
~Frances Anne Kemble

Pounding the pavement

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.
~Robert Louis Stevenson

Churches

How can the Church be received as a trustworthy guide in the invisible,
which falls into so many errors in the visible?
~John W. Draper

On life

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress

except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.
~Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

The long way home

We live in a very tense society. We are pulled apart... and we all need to learn how to pull ourselves together....
I think that at least part of the answer lies in solitude.
~Helen Hayes

Civilisation

Codi: Gives you the willies, doesn't it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop? [referring to cliff dwellings]
Loyd: No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway.
~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

Eye see

I think your whole life shows in your face and you should be proud of that.
~Lauren Bacall

Steel birds

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.
~Henry David Thoreau

My sunshine, my "I do"

A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.
~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Frozen monolith

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.
~Bill Vaughn

Hail planet earth

Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating;
there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.
~John Ruskin

Just... blue

Azure, cobalt blue, cornflower blue, cyan, electric blue, ice blue, indigo, lapis lazuli, midnight blue, navy blue, peacock blue, powder blue, Prussian blue, royal blue, sapphire, saxe blue, sky blue, slate blue, steel blue, turquoise, ultramarine...

Paper bridges

The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.
~David Russell

Happy New Year

The new year begins in a snow-storm of white vows.
~George William Curtis