“Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, wheras literature teaches us to notice. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life.”
― James Wood, How Fiction Works
Detail
Pioneer Plaza
Dallas, Texas
Detail
Pioneer Plaza
Dallas, Texas
Detail
Pioneer Plaza
Dallas, Texas
“Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.”
― Plato
Mural of Madison King
behind cars from the Invasion Car Show
Deep Ellum
Dallas, Texas
Mural of Madison King, by Frank Campagna
I’ve been a fan of Madison King for a while now and was glad that Frank Campagna chose her for one of the murals in Deep Ellum.
Madison King at the first Patio Session
“I’d been chasing females all my life, not paying no mind to the fact that whatever’s got tail at one end has teeth at the other, and now I was getting chomped.”
― Jim Thompson, Pop. 1280
Pioneer Plaza
Dallas, Texas
If you don’t die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young.
—-Anne Lamott
Pioneer Plaza
Dallas, Texas
So many people visit and take photos of the bronze cattle drive in Pioneer Plaza. It’s a challenge to find something ten thousand tourists haven’t shot on their phones before.
“Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
Downtown Dallas
Texas
“your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
Klyde Warren Park
Dallas, Texas
“By early evening all the sky to the north had darkened and the spare terrain they trod had turned a neuter gray as far as the eye could see. They grouped in the road at the top of a rise and looked back. The storm front towered above them and the wind was cool on their sweating faces. They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
The Continental Building
Dallas, Texas
Click Here for a larger version on Flickr.
This is a well-known mosaic by Millard Sheets on the front of The Continental Building in downtown Dallas. There was some worry that the artwork would be destroyed during renovation – but the owners have committed to preserving it.
“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple
(click to enlarge)
Invasion car show
Deep Ellum
Dallas, Texas
“And therein lies the whole of man’s plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Downtown Dallas, Texas
“The Guide says there is an art to flying”, said Ford, “or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
Klyde Warren Park
Dallas, Texas
Bill Chance 