I Have but One Life to GIF

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Black and White, Cinema, Drear, GIF, Literary Quotations, Nature, Photography, Quotations, Sand, Sea, Stone, Water

“I have always shook with fright before human beings.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“Nothing like poetry when you lie awake at night. It keeps the old brain limber. It washes away the mud and sand that keeps on blocking up the bends. Like waves to make the pebbles dance on my old floors. And turn them into rubies and jacinths; or at any rate, good imitations.”
― Joyce Cary, The Horse’s Mouth

“The . . . sun was shining in at the smoky small-paned windows; sometimes an outside shutter swung to with a creak, and eclipsed the glare. The narrow door stood wide open . . . and an old spotted dog lay asleep on the step, and looked wise and old enough to have gone to school with several generations of children.”
― Sarah Orne Jewett, A Native of Winby

“It is a strange thing to come home. While yet on the journey, you cannot at all realize how strange it will be.”
― Selma Lagerlöf

“You know, David, if I could send a message to mankind, I would send them a New Year’s greeting. I would like them to dwell on a single New Year’s prayer: ‘Lord, please let my soul come to maturity before it is reaped.'”
― The Phantom Carriage (1921), directed by Victor Sjöström; based on Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness! by Selma Lagerlöf

Music– Edit’s Chamber – Matti Bye

“No Terror in the Bang…”

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Abstract, Black and White, Cine-Quotes, Creature, Drear, Literary Quotations, October, Photography, Reflection, Spider, Water

“A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man. They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge. Sights and impressions which others brush aside with a glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy him more than their due; they sink silently in, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure. Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”
– Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“-I visit this room every night…
-Visit?
-The blind always live in the rooms they live under.”
– Peeping Tom (1960)

“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”
– Alfred Hitchcock

Happy October…

🦇👻👀

“Never Again Shall There be Birds in Cages…”

Tags

Black and White, Drear, Nature, Photography, Quotations

“- I think it’s a pity that the beautiful old houses are being torn down.
– They don’t bring in enough rent.
– The empty spaces look like graves. Like house graves.”
— From the film Alice in the Cities

“Life is a series of suicides…”
— From the film Love Streams

“And break through dark;
It’s acrid in the streets;
A paper witch upon her sulphured broom
Flies from the gutter.”
— Dylan Thomas, Time Enough to Rot

“If only I could so live and so serve the world that after me there should never again be birds in cages.”
— Isak Dinesen (penname of Karen Blixen)

Happy October 😉

Where October Lives…

Tags

Drear, Florida, Literary Quotations, Music, Nature, October, Photography, Quotations

“October Country . . . that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and mid-nights stay.”
– Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“I saw what looked like another fallen tree in front of me and put my foot on it to cross over. At that moment it reared up in front of me- the biggest python I had ever seen!”
– Louis Leakey, archaeologist and anthropologist (DOD 1 October 1972)

“A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained. It can afford to extend a helping hand to others.”
– Jimmy Carter (DOB 1 October 1924)

“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”
– L. M. Montgomery, Ann of Green Gablesjnmh

“That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain. . . .”
– Ray Bradbury, The October Country

Happy October, everyone.

“The Sun the Color of Pressed Grapes…”

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Abstract, Beach, Black and White, Blur, Drear, Experimental Photography, Nature, Ocean, Pensive, Photography, Quotes, Sand, Sea, Twilight

“He opens his eyes and stares directly into the morning sun which wallows up from the misty sea like some bloated, dying fish. The sky is gray and immobile, a dome of lead. A cloud hangs mute and dark over the western horizon. High up, barely visible, a seagull floats on motionless wings. Its cry is weird and restless.”
– Ingmar Bergman, The Seventh Seal

“I had forgotten that time wasn’t fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end. ”
– Joyce Carol Oates, I Am No One You Know

“Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.”
– Jack Kerouac, On the Road

In the Ivory Light of Winter

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Abstract, Black and White, Drear, Droplets, Florida, Light, Lonely, Loss, Monochrome, Nature, Pensive, Photography, Quotes, Rain, Sky, Stark, Sunset, Urban, Water

“But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope”
-From “Middlemarch” by George Eliot

“When I left my home and my family
I was no more than a boy
In the company of strangers
In the quiet of the railway station running scared
Laying low, seeking out the poorer quarters
Where the ragged people go
Looking for the places only they would know”
-From the song, “The Boxer” by Simon and Garfunkel

“Even death has a heart.”
-Markus Zusak, “The Book Thief”

“We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.”
-Carl Sagan
“The old ones called it ‘the hour of the wolf’. It is the hour when the most people die, and the most are born. At this time, nightmares come to us. And when we awake, we are afraid.”
-Ingmar Bergman, film “The Hour of the Wolf” (“Vargtimmen”)

Craggy Gutter

Tags

Black and White, Decay, Drear, Fall, Gutter, Leaves, Nature, Photography, Poem, Poetry, Rain, Thoughts

Dull dysthymia
Lurches in dawn
Hearing wind chimes
And conscience gone

Pneuma, a ragged reflection,
Stolid, bold as the barren kern
That stumbles into scathing sea
These eyes of limestone, wrathful burn

It is captured, then bleeds detached-
Down-trodden, the Lone Leaf that flits
In the cool wind’s mist, a grey wheeze
Vomits barnacles, writhes and spits

Reticent It swims in pools of rain
Gathered in the craggy gutter
Lil’ yellow leaf swirling alone
Decays there with doleful flutter

Such is a Soul
Dead cries implore
Mute, say one thing
And nothing more

Porcine Wings and Flower Skulls

Tags

Abstract Photography, Drear, Night, Night Photography, Photography, Poetry, Rain, Thoughts

Door swinging in wind

Waiting for the midnight train-

Possum waddles by

In street-puddles swims the moon

Water oily black

Wandering in rain-sloshed thought

Roads brushed in silence

In the grimy windowpane-

Fog and memory

Iodine Sun (The Last Geo-Engineer)

Tags

Black and White, Dark, Drear, Fall, Gossamer, Light and Shadow, Nature, Photograph, Prose, Stark, Sunlight, Web, Woods

Iodine sun seeps through the gauze of sulfuric cloud, atmosphere smothered as sunset swims on still pools of flaming auburn. Dead leaves swirl at the surface. Staggering, spilling, fisticuffing with the twisting branches that grasp and clutch, I toss into the prickly, stinging copse of thorns and splinters. There, at last, I find stillness, inhaling the heady scent of decay, visage buried in debris, listening to the writhing of beetles and centipedes beneath.

As a species decants into the Night, there may linger a faded imprint, but Nature utilizes and swiftly forgets her creatures lost- she knows no mourning as a comet smears the evening sky, unseen, and a last breath escapes with a silent wheeze.