"If you don't control your mind, someone else will." -John Allston

"The only normal people..." "...are the ones you don't know very well."

-Foe Ancis

remembering maine

"When you're looking at something beautiful and grand and sort of peaceful, it's always seems nicer to be with someone who doesn't talk." -Ralph Moody

"It was only the fool or the witless that felt no fear. What a man must do was go on, anyway."

-Louis L'Amour ("Heller With a Gun")

"To rob the millionaire is as dishonorable a thing as to rob the widow." -Tully Bascomb (The Mouse That Roared)

"There is a garden in every childhood..."

"...an enchanted place where colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again." -Elizabeth Lawrence

"Spring being a tough act to follow..."
"...God created June." -Al Bernstein

"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt." -Abraham Lincoln

"Every year I begin to think that there is nothing worth hope in this world, and every year spring comes - like music." -Cynthia Voigt

"The lesson of failure ought to be as instructive as that of success. Wise men learn from their mistakes and unfortunate ventures. It is claimed that more men triumph through failure than otherwise."

-William Thayer, Gaining Favor with God and Man

You Look Funny

"It is an immense importance to learn to laugh at ourselves." -Katherine Mansfield Even while you look too thin...

Even while your hair is graying...
Even if your nose is far too large...

Just Laugh.

"We are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is campatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutual weirdness and call it love." -author unknown

"Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be."

~Thomas à Kempis

Tenacity

"Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go." -William Feather

Great Rules of Writing

Do not put statements in the negative form.
And don't start sentences with a conjunction.
If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a
great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.
De-accession euphemisms.
If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.

~William Safire

The Breakfast Test

"The people I love are always somewhere else and not able to come to me, while I can at any time fill the house with visitors about whom I know little and care less. Perhaps, if I saw more of those absent ones, I would not love them so well— at least, that is what I think on wet days when the wind is howling round the house and all nature is overcome with grief; and it has actually happened once or twice when great friends have been staying with me that I have wished, when they left, I might not see them again for at least ten years. I suppose the fact is, that no friendship can stand the breakfast test, and here, in the country, we invariably think it our duty to appear at breakfast. Civilisation has done away with curl-papers, yet at that hour the soul of the Hausfrau is as tightly screwed up in them as was ever her grandmother's hair; and though my body comes down mechanically, having been trained that way by punctual parents, my soul never thinks of beginning to wake up for other people till lunch-time, and never does so completely till it has been taken out of doors and aired in the sunshine. Who can begin conventional amiability the first thing in the morning? It is the hour of savage instincts and natural tendencies; it is the triumph of the Disagreeable and the Cross. I am convinced that the Muses and the Graces never thought of having breakfast anywhere but in bed."

-Elizabeth and Her German Garden

"You see, boys forget what their country means by just reading The Land of the Free in history books. Then they get to be men they forget even more. Liberty's too precious a thing to be buried in books, Miss Saunders. Men should hold it up in front of them every single day of their lives and say: I'm free to think and to speak. My ancestors couldn't, I can, and my children will. Boys ought to grow up remembering that." -Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

"Just living is not enough..."

"...one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower."

-Hans Christian Andersen

"The greatest barrier to success is the fear of failure."
-Sven Goran Eriksson

"There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man." ~Winston Churchill

(Natalie and me riding on Friday)