I love flowers. The beautiful blooms really brightened my day.
What is your favourite flower? I think mine is currently the white lily. I seem to change so often, but currently that is the state which I am in again, as I was eight years ago, when I wrote a class essay dedicated to the spirit of the white lily.
Flowers shared from Paris Apartment
“His first act, therefore, was the journey. But it that not the case for all reporters? Is not our first thought to go on the road? The road is our source, our vault of treasures, our wealth. Only on the road does the reporter feel like himself, at home.
Such people, while useful, even agreeable, to others, are, if truth be told, frequently unhappy — lonely in fact. Yes, they seek out others and it may even seem to them that in a certain country or city they have managed to find true kindred and fellowship, having come to know and learn about a people, but they wake up one day and feel suddenly that nothing actually binds them to these people, that they can leave here at once.
For all intents and purposes, they do not grow attached to anything, do not put down deep roots. Their empathy is sincere, but superficial. If asked which of the countries they liked best, they are embarassed, they do not know how to answer. Which one? In a certain sense, all of them. There is something compelling about each. To which country would they like to return once more? Again, embarassment. They had never asked themselves such a question. The one certainty is that they would like to be back on the road, going somewhere. To be on their way again — that is the dream.”
Travels with Herodotus, Ryzard Kapucinksi
Superstition in Russia has it that when the first three digits of your train ticket added up equal the last three digits, you should eat the ticket for good luck! Art Lebedev Studio has made this more palatable with these lucky cookie tickets.
Designed by Art Lebedev Studio for the Russian Ministry of Transport. (via Yanko Design)
Le bruit des hommes est terrifiant, et celui qu’ils font en parlant m’assourdit. Je les aime au coin des rues, loin, étrangers à moi, assis dans le café. Si l’un d’entre eux s’approchait, pourrait-il exiger ma main, et si je lui donnais les deux, saurait-il en faire autre chose qu’un nœud derrière mon dos ? Je n’en crois pas un mot.
“It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future–flowers and gold, girls and stars, they are only prefigurations and prophecies of that incomparable, unattainable young dream.”
“In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don’t know what I am. I don’t know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know where he is or not. He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not what he is and he is what he is not. Beyond the unlamped wall I can hear the rain shaping the wagon that is ours, the load that is no longer theirs that felled and sawed it nor yet theirs that bought it and which is not ours either, lie on our wagon though it does, since only the wind and the rain shape it only to Jewel and me, that are not asleep. And Jewel is, so Addie Bundren must be. And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so if I am not emptied yet, I am is.” – Faulkner (As I Lay Dying)
One side of the potato-pits was white with frost—
How wonderful that was, how wonderful!
And when we put our ears to the paling-post
The music that came out was magical.
The light between the ricks of hay and straw
Was a hole in Heaven’s gable. An apple tree
With its December-glinting fruit we saw—
O you, Eve, were the world that tempted me
To eat the knowledge that grew in clay
And death the germ within it! Now and then
I can remember something of the gay
Garden that was childhood’s. Again
The tracks of cattle to a drinking-place,
A green stone lying sideways in a ditch
Or any common sight the transfigured face
Of a beauty that the world did not touch.
My father played the melodeon
Outside at our gate;
There were stars in the morning east
And they danced to his music.
Across the wild bogs his melodeon called
To Lennons and Callans.
As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry
I knew some strange thing had happened.
Outside the cow-house my mother
Made the music of milking;
The light of her stable-lamp was a star
And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle
A water-hen screeched in the bog,
Mass-going feet
Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes,
Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel.
My child poet picked out the letters
On the grey stone,
In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland,
The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.
Cassiopeia was over
Cassidy’s hanging hill,
I looked and three whin* bushes rode across
The horizon — The Three Wise Kings.
An old man passing said:
‘Can’t he make it talk’—
The melodeon. I hid in the doorway
And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat.
I nicked six nicks on the door-post
With my penknife’s big blade—
There was a little one for cutting tobacco,
And I was six Christmases of age.
My father played the melodeon,
My mother milked the cows,
And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned
On the Virgin Mary’s blouse.
I admit it, I am recently very enamoured by Cate. I think I am, for all Kates. But she looks absolutely lovely in Givenchy Haute Couture.
Penny Sparkle 