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

Spooky spinsters

Light can be gentle, dangerous, dreamlike, bare, living, dead, misty, clear, hot, dark, violet, springlike, falling, straight, sensual, limited, poisonous, calm and soft. ~Sven Nykvist

Duality

Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall behind you.
~Maori Proverb