Favorite Quotes

"We chase extraordinary moments instead of being grateful for ordinary moments until hard shit happens. And then in the face of really hard stuff -- illness, death, loss -- the only thing we're begging for is a normal moment."
-- Brené Brown

 

 "For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love."
– Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. Contact

 

“In the time since the Baudelaire parents' death, most of the Baudelaire orphans' friends had fallen by the wayside, an expression which here means "they stopped calling, writing, and stopping by to see any of the Baudelaires, making them lonely". You and I, of course, would never do this to any of our grieving acquaintances, but it is a sad truth that when someone has lost a loved one, friends sometimes avoid the person, just when the presence of friends is most needed.”
― Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning 

 

"People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within."
-- Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.

 

“Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.”

-- Georgia O’Keeffe

"Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life."

-- Rachel Carson

 "Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts."
-- Henry David Thoreau

 

"Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again."
-- Nelson Mandela.

"We simply need that wild country available to us… For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope."
-Wallace Stegner

“Art is never finished, only abandoned”
--Leonardo Da Vinci 

“There's no retirement for an artist, it's your way of living so there's no end to it.”
--Henry Moore 

“Never be limited by other people’s limited imaginations.”
-- Dr. Mae Jemison

“The only time I feel alive is when I'm painting.”

-- Vincent Van Gogh 
 
“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way--things I had no words for.”
--Georgia O'Keeffe 

“Life obliges me to do something, so I paint.”
--Rene Magritte 
 
“To create one’s own world in the arts takes courage.”

--Georgia O’Keeffe

“Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.”
--Langston Hughes

 
“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost..."
-- J.R.R. Tolkien

“I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”
-- Henry David Thoreau

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here forever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”
-- Virginia Wolf, The Waves

"To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires."
--W. E. B. Du Bois

“The highest form of love is to be the protector of another person’s solitude.”
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

“I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.”

-- E. B. White, Letters of E. B. White

“If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
― E.B. White

 

"English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street."

― E.B. White

 

"For those who have experienced the joy of being alone with nature there is really little need for me to say much more; for those who have not, no words of mine can ever describe the powerful, almost mystical knowledge of beauty and eternity that come, suddenly, and all unexpected."
-- Jane Goodall

While I was sharing some of my artwork at a school presentation one day, out of the blue I had a student ask me, "How can the world be made a more beautiful place?”

“That’s easy,” I said. “Fund artists and let
the politicians starve."

-- Mark A. Hicks, illustrator

“Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh... now you tell me what you know.”
-- Groucho Marx