“This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect, persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”
—Adam Smith (via azspot) (via the-broom-cupboard)
January 2011
“All great deeds and all great thoughts
have a ridiculous beginning. Great works
are often born on a street corner or in
a restaurant’s revolving door.
— Albert Camus” —
have a ridiculous beginning. Great works
are often born on a street corner or in
a restaurant’s revolving door.
— Albert Camus” —
Sunday in Bangkok: Complete tanka series
Raindrops, tenacious,
tentative on bamboo twigs,
seeming a promise,
cling for an eternity
all their own and then are gone.
Another pebble
shining in the flowing stream,
one among many.
The current passes over,
enhanced by, enhancing each.
Ridiculous sight:
fat roof-top dog, sweatered,
basking in the sun.
For the first time in too long,
I find that I am smiling.
It begins again,
then stops short, mid-crescendo,
beyond my window…
a city bird has somehow
managed to forget its song.
Early on Sundays,
listless-looking pole-dancers
drag themselves toward home,
seeming as if they too are
trying to recall their song.
Reduced to the space
of an urban balcony,
this garden of mine—
a few bamboo, an orchid—
can still fill my heart with joy.
On a crowded bus,
flattened and gasping for breath,
I briefly recall
the soap-scented office girls
who rode the trains in Japan.
The old monk I saw,
absent, fallen ill they say.
I find I miss him
and wonder if a prayer
of my faith might be helpful.
These things I cherish:
the moment between glances;
stillness beneath sound;
the voice of the unuttered;
the darkness behind the light.
—Michael Boiano
COULEURS: The cage →
yama-bato.tumblr.com
In the waking night
The forests have stopped growing
The shells are listening
The shadows in the pools turn grey
The pearls dissolve in the shadow
And I return to you
Your face is marked upon the clockface,
My hands are beneath your hair
And if the time you mark sets free the birds
And if they…
“
What’s in store for me in the direction I don’t take?
— Jack Kerouac
” —
“
You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.
—Charles Bukowski
” —
“In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors.”
—William Blake/aperfectcommotion (via thelittlesea)
“In dreams and in love there are no impossibilities.”
— Janus Arony. (via quote-book)
You ask my thoughts
through the long night?
I spent it listening
to the heavy rain
beating against the windows.
—Izumi Shikibu
“be it peace or happiness
let it enfold you”
— Charles Bukowski” —
let it enfold you”
— Charles Bukowski” —
“If there is to be any peace it will come through being, not having.”
—Henry Miller (via thelittlesea)
“Now listen, life is lovely, but I Can’t Live It. I can’t even explain. I know how silly it sounds… but if you knew how it Felt. To be alive, yes, alive, but not be able to live it. Ay that’s the rub. I am like a stone that lives… locked outside of all that’s real… do you know of such things, can you hear? I wish, or think I wish, that I were dying of something for then I could be brave, but to be not dying, and yet… and yet to be behind a wall, watching everyone fit in where I can’t, to talk behind a gray foggy wall, to live but to not reach or to reach wrong… to do it all wrong… believe me, (can you?) what’s wrong. I want to belong… I’m not a member. I’m frozen.”
—— Anne Sexton, A Self-Portrait in Letters (via bunnymitford) (via awritersruminations, bunnymitford) (via libraryland)
“Move and the way will open”
—Zen Proverb
(via yama-bato)
(via yama-bato)
“
With two thousand years of Christianity behind him… a man can’t see a regiment of soldiers march past without going off the deep end. It starts off far too many ideas in his head.
—Louis-Ferdinand Celine
” —
“I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens. —Isaac Bashevis Singer”
—
“
“The little prince went away, to look again at the roses.
“You’re not at all like my rose,” he said.
“As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one.
You’re like my fox when I first knew him.
He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes.
But I have made a friend, and now he’s unique in all the world.”
And the roses were very much embarrassed.
“You’re beautiful, but you’re empty,” he went on. “One could not die for you.
To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you
–the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she’s more important
than all the hundreds of you other roses:
because it is she that I have watered;
because it is she that I have put under the glass globe;
because it is for her that I’ve killed the caterpillars
(except the two or three we saved to become butterflies);
because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled,
or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing.
Because she is MY rose.
— Antoine de St. Exupery
” —