There is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern and a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would like to make or in which he would like to wander, … Continue reading Quote for Today: G.K. Chesterton
landscape
Portraits of a Nation: The Devastating Beauty of Yemen
Challenged by the unknown and unfamiliar, we often turn away. Can our curiosity help us to become better, kinder people? This is the first post of a series exploring foreign cultures. We begin with Yemen, focusing not on the bloodshed and the destruction wreaked upon her, but the humanity and beauty that make her both … Continue reading Portraits of a Nation: The Devastating Beauty of Yemen
Quote for Today: Geoff Dyer
We'd never seen anything as green as these rice paddies. It was not just the paddies themselves: the surrounding vegetation - foliage so dense the trees lost track of whose leaves were whose - was a rainbow coalition of one colour: green. There was an infinity of greens, rendered all the greener by splashes of … Continue reading Quote for Today: Geoff Dyer
Quote for Today: A.E. Housman
Oh fair enough are sky and plain, But I know fairer far: Those are as beautiful again That in the water are; The pools and rivers wash so clean The trees and clouds and air, The like on earth was never seen, And oh that I were there. These are the thoughts I often think … Continue reading Quote for Today: A.E. Housman
Quote for Today: Brian Froud
In the countryside, the old stories seemed to come alive around me; the faeries were a tangible aspect of the landscape, pulses of spirit, emotion, and light. They "insisted" on taking form under my pencil, emerging on the page before me cloaked in archetypal shapes drawn from nature and myth. I'd attracted their attention, you … Continue reading Quote for Today: Brian Froud
Quote for Today: Doris Lessing
Over the plains of Ethiopia the sun rose as I had not seen it in seven years. A big, cool, empty sky flushed a little above a rim of dark mountains. The landscape 20,000 feet below gathered itself from the dark and showed a pale gleam of grass, a sheen of water. The red deepened … Continue reading Quote for Today: Doris Lessing
Quote for Today: Tom Robbins
There are landscapes in which we feel above us not sky but space. Something larger, deeper than sky is sensed, is seen, although in such settings the sky itself is invariably immense. There is a place between the cerebrum and the stars where sky stops and space commences, and should we find ourselves on a … Continue reading Quote for Today: Tom Robbins
Quote for Today: Isabel Allende
Roots are not in landscape or a country, or a people, they are inside you. --Isabel Allende
Quote for Today: Annie Proulx
Dangerous and indifferent ground: against its fixed mass the tragedies of people count for nothing although the signs of misadventure are everywhere. No past slaughter nor cruelty, no accident nor murder that occurs on the little ranches or at the isolate crossroads with their bare populations of three or seventeen, or in the reckless trailer … Continue reading Quote for Today: Annie Proulx
Quote for Today: Haruki Murakami
Sometimes, when one is moving silently through such an utterly desolate landscape, an overwhelming hallucination can make one feel that oneself, as an individual human being, is slowly being unraveled. The surrounding space is so vast that it becomes increasingly difficult to keep a balanced grip on one's own being. The mind swells out to … Continue reading Quote for Today: Haruki Murakami