“Yes, and imagine a world where there were no hypothetical situations.”
― Jasper Fforde, First Among Sequels
Partial Time-Travel Is Now!
Tag Archives: Photography
Piercing
“Everybody wants to talk about themselves, and everybody wants to hear everybody else’s story, so we take turns playing reporter and celebrity.”
― Ryu Murakami
Fetch the Duck
“Small men oft feel a need to prove their courage with unseemly boasts,” he declared. “I doubt if he could kill a duck.”
Tyrion shrugged. “Fetch the duck.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons
Bachman Lake, Dallas, Texas
It Cannot be Improved
“The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer,
the wheel. Once invented it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon
that is better than a spoon”
― Umberto Eco
Stampede
“He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activities in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
What I See When I Go For A Walk
“Don’t you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don’t you believe in telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life after death?
No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no.
One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst out “Don’t you believe in anything?”
Yes”, I said. “I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I’ll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.”
― Isaac Asimov
Over break, I’m working on an addition to my exercise regime. In addition to ten miles a day on the bike (which is usually on my spin bike indoors) I added a minimum two mile walk outside. I increase that a little every day. Sometimes I take my dog with me, sometimes I go alone (the dog is very good on a leash, but holding the thing and not being able to swing my arms cramps my rhythm a bit).
I look for odd things on my walks – here is a strange and wonderful sign I saw today along the paved hike/bike trail.
Pastel Moonrise
“She didn’t quite know what the relationship was between lunatics and the moon, but it must be a strong one, if they used a word like that to describe the insane.”
― Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die
I slipped out of work an hour early, the sun was just then setting. The moon was rising in the east poking through the thin pastel clouds. A beautiful scene. I took it as a good omen. We’ll see.
Things Which Cannot Inspire Envy
“The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees, or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him?
No, thank you,’ he will think. ‘Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, although these are things which cannot inspire envy.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
The Tendency Not To Understand Who We Are
“Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.”
― Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
Wreckage
“The wreckage of stars – I built a world from this wreckage.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Dithyrambs of Dionysus
Bill Chance 