Harmony is so essential. Is there pleasure when there is a passage, there is when every room is open.
– Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
This shows the disorder, it does, it shows more likeness than anything else, it shows the single mind that directs the apple.
– Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
But we are all travelers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of this world – all, too, travelers with a donkey; and the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend. He is a fortunate voyager who finds many. We travel, indeed, to find them. They are the end and the reward of life. They keep us worthy of ourselves; and, when we are alone, we are only nearer to the absent.
– R. L. Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes
…let her go at her own pace, and let me patiently follow.
– R. L. Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes
There is something better than music in the wide unusual silence; and it disposes him to amiable thoughts, like the sound of a little river or the warmth of sunlight.
– R. L. Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes
…but you never can tell wherein a man’s life consists, nor in what he sets his pleasure…
– R. L. Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes
…by a startling democratic process, the defects of the majority decide the type of beauty.
– R. L. Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes
You be damned to be one of us, girl,
Faced with the dodo’s conundrum
I felt like I could just fly
But nothing happened every time I tried.
– The Shins, Australia
He never asked unless he wanted to know and he could not conceive of the brain that would ask without wanting to know.
– John Steinbeck, Cannery Row
The remarkable thing isn’t that they put their tails up in the air – the really incredibly remarkable thing is that we find it remarkable. We can only use ourselves as yardsticks. If we did something as inexplicable and strange we’d probably be praying – so maybe they’re praying.
– John Steinbeck, Cannery Row