A photo I took a while back of the Chihuly Exhibit in the Arboretum, with White Rock Lake’s Winfrey Point in the distance across an arm of the lake. This huge glass sculpture is called “The Sun.”
Chihuly with Winfrey Point in the background, across the water.
A shot I took from a bicycle ride on Winfrey Point, with the Arboretum and the Chihuly Sun in the background.
Arboretum from Winfrey Point, a peloton of cyclists going by on the road.
He had met her through a mutual friend that thought they would be good for each other. On their first date, he had taken her to Olivier’s and it felt like they had known each other all their lives. They ate Creole Rabbit and Crawfish Étouffée.
She left him on a gray and drizzling day. He still goes to Olivier’s and watches for her, though he knows she won’t come walking in.
“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.”
—- Groucho Marx
Statue on top of a crypt, Saint Louis Cemetery Number One, New Orleans
God buries His workmen but carries on His work.
—-Charles Wesley
“Any fool can write a book and most of them are doing it; but it takes brains to build a house.”
—- Charles F. Lummis
“Our house was made of stone, stucco, and clapboard; the newer wings, designed by a big-city architect, had a good deal of glass, and looked out into the Valley, where on good days we could see for many miles while on humid hazy days we could see barely beyond the fence that marked the edge of our property. Father, however, preferred the roof: In his white, light-woolen three-piece suit, white fedora cocked back on his head, for luck, he spent many of his waking hours on the highest peak of the highest roof of the house, observing, through binoculars, the amazing progress of construction in the Valley – for overnight, it seemed, there appeared roads, expressways, sewers, drainage pipes, “planned” communities with such names as Whispering Glades, Murmuring Oaks, Pheasant Run, Deer Willow, all of them walled to keep out intruders, and, yet more astonishing, towerlike buildings of aluminum and glass and steel and brick, buildings whose windows shone and winked like mirrors, splendid in sunshine like pillars of flame; such beauty where once there had been mere earth and sky, it caught at your throat like a great bird’s talons, taking your breath away. ‘The ways of beauty are as a honeycomb,’ Father told us, and none of us could determine, staring at his slow moving lips, whether the truth he spoke was a happy truth or not, whether even it was truth.”
—-Joyce Carol Oates
“For me, it is as though at every moment the actual world had completely lost its actuality. As though there was nothing there; as though there were no foundations for anything or as though it escaped us. Only one thing, however, is vividly present: the constant tearing of the veil of appearances; the constant destruction of everything in construction. Nothing holds together, everything falls apart.”
—-Eugene Ionesco
“Blessed are they who have the gift of making friends, for it is one of God’s best gifts. It involves many things, but above all, the power of going out of one’s self, and appreciating whatever is noble and loving in another.”
—-Thomas Hughes
“Mr. Wickham is blessed with such happy manners as may ensure his MAKING friends–whether he may be equally capable of RETAINING them, is less certain.”
—-Jane Austen
“There is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. In or out of ’em, it doesn’t matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that’s the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don’t; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you’re always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you’ve done it there’s always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you’d much better not.”
Spoken by Ratty to Mole in Wind in the Willows a children’s book by Kenneth Grahame
Sailboats on White Rock Lake, Dallas, TX
(Click for a larger and more detailed version on Flickr)
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea…”
– Antoine de Saint Exupery
The beauty of a move lies not in its appearance but in the thought behind it.
—-Aaron Nimzowitsch
… the woman who grows up with the idea that she is simply to be an amiable animal, to be caressed and coaxed, is invariably a bitterly disappointed woman. A game of chess will cure such a conceit forever. The woman that knows the most, thinks the most, feels the most, is the most. Intellectual affection is the only lasting love. Love that has a game of chess in it can checkmate any man and solve the problem of life.
—- Charles Dickens
Let us read and let us dance – two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.
—-Voltaire
Bill Chance 