SUMMER
I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer. My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music. It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips.
~Violette Leduc, Mad in Pursuit
What is one to say about June, the time of perfect young summer, the fulfillment of the promise of the earlier months, and with as yet no sign to remind one that its fresh young beauty will ever fade.
~Gertrude Jekyll
In June, as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day. No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them.
~Aldo Leopold
Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time.
~John Lubbock
Summer is the time when one sheds one's tensions with one's clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all's right with the world.
~Ada Louise Huxtable
IMAGINATION
I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities.
~Theodore Geisel
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.
~William Shakespeare, Mid-Summer Night's Dream, 1595
The creative person is both more primitive and more cultivated, more destructive, a lot madder and a lot saner, than the average person.
~Frank Barron, Think, November-December 1962
Imagination and fiction make up more than three-quarters of our real life.
~Simone Weil
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.
~Albert Einstein
SIMPLICITY
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction. ~E.F. Schumacher
Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.
~Confucius
Frugality is one of the most beautiful and joyful words in the English language, and yet one that we are culturally cut off from understanding and enjoying. The consumption society has made us feel that happiness lies in having things, and has failed to teach us the happiness of not having things.
~Elise Boulding
Everything we possess that is not necessary for life or happiness becomes a burden, and scarcely a day passes that we do not add to it.
~Robert Brault
Tis the month of June, where blossoms bloom and all is right, the world’s in tune!
~ Joni Zipp
ON WRITING
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"Know something, sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them."
~Allan Gurganus
"A writer lives, at least, in a state of astonishment. Beneath any feeling he has of the good or evil of the world lies a deeper one of wonder at it all. To transmit that feeling, he writes."
~William Sansom
"However great a man's natural talent may be, the art of writing cannot be learned all at once."
~Jean Jacques Rousseau
Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write."
~Robert Penn Warren
BREVITY
It is with words as with sunbeams. The more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.
~Robert Southey
A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.
~William Strunk, Jr., The Elements of Style, 1918
"In good prose (says Schlegel) every word should be underlined!" that is, every word should be the right one; and then no one would be righter than another. There are no italics in Plato.
~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
If you can't write your idea on the back of my calling card, you don't have a clear idea.
~David Belasco
SELF-CONTROL
Self-respect is the root of discipline: The sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself.
~Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Insecurity of Freedom: Essays on Human Existence, 1967
The cyclone derives its powers from a calm center. So does a person.
~Norman Vincent Peale
It is a man's own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways.
~Buddha
And so, Reader, (for it is time to have done with guessing) would I bid you conquer in your warfare against your four great enemies, the world, the devil, the flesh, and above all, that obstinate and perverse self-will, unaided by which the other three would be comparatively powerless.
~Augustus William Hare
SIMPLICITY
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction.
~E.F. Schumacher
Frugality is one of the most beautiful and joyful words in the English language, and yet one that we are culturally cut off from understanding and enjoying. The consumption society has made us feel that happiness lies in having things, and has failed to teach us the happiness of not having things.
~Elise Boulding
Everything we possess that is not necessary for life or happiness becomes a burden, and scarcely a day passes that we do not add to it.
~Robert Brault,
To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter... to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring - these are some of the rewards of the simple life.
~John Burroughs
“It is with simplicity, brevity and self-control that I will go on writing. ” ~Joni Zipp
