↓
 

words and images

🇺🇦✏️✒️📚📔🌜dreamer 🌕 thinker 🌕 aspirant📱📷🚴‍♀️🏕🍄🌻

Menu
  • Home
  • Articles
  • Book Reviews
  • Letters
  • Photography
  • Poems & Stories
  • About Diane Schirf
  • Site Map

Category Archives: Quotations

Post navigation

← Older posts

“Far more happier” (The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes)

I just realized (or remembered, now I think about it) Kindle has a visual quotation feature. This one refers to Tahiti, “paradise” to the early sailors who landed there and found a different and less restrictive society, not so much after a few visits.

IMG_2621
January 22, 2023 by dlschirf Posted in Blog, Books, Quotations Tagged european history, history, nonfiction, quotation Reply

Me on Black Friday

words and images Posted on November 25, 2011 by dlschirfMay 1, 2020

During the annual Black Friday shopping event, Americans spend money they don’t have on things they don’t need and that don’t make them happy or happier, just poorer and unsatisfied. Then, like Charlie Brown, they wonder what happened to the spirit of Christmas.

Diane Schirf
Posted in Blog, Quotations | Tagged holiday, quotation | 1 Reply

Washington Irving on Poets Corner (Westminster Abbey)

words and images Posted on November 24, 2011 by dlschirfApril 4, 2020

I passed some time in Poets Corner, which occupies an end of one of the transepts or cross aisles of the abbey. The monuments are generally simple; for the lives of literary men afford no striking themes for the sculptor. Shakespeare and Addison have statues erected to their memories; but the greater part have busts, medallions, and sometimes mere inscriptions. Notwithstanding the simplicity of these memorials, I have always observed that the visitors to the abbey remained longest about them. A kinder and fonder feeling takes place of that cold curiosity or vague admiration with which they gaze on the splendid monuments of the great and the heroic. They linger about these as about the tombs of friends and companions; for indeed there is something of companionship between the author and the reader. Other men are known to posterity only through the medium of history, which is continually growing faint and obscure: but the intercourse between the author and his fellow-men is ever new, active, and immediate. He has lived for them more than for himself; he has sacrificed surrounding enjoyments, and shut himself up from the delights of social life, that he might the more intimately commune with distant minds and distant ages. Well may the world cherish his renown; for it has been purchased, not by deeds of violence and blood, but by the diligent dispensation of pleasure. Well may posterity be grateful to his memory; for he has left it an inheritance, not of empty names and sounding actions, but whole treasures of wisdom, bright gems of thought, and golden veins of language.

Washington Irving, “Westminster Abbey”
Posted in Blog, Quotations | Tagged commonplace book, quotation, Washington Irving | Leave a reply

Overheard

words and images Posted on June 6, 2010 by dlschirfJanuary 6, 2023

She’s living in a place where you take the Obama sticker off your car.

Two women discussing a friend
Posted in Quotations | Leave a reply

Relics: Phone books

words and images Posted on April 3, 2010 by dlschirfApril 30, 2020

Desk attendant at the Flamingo:

Every now and then I used to get a resident come down and ask for a [phone] book, but not anymore.

Posted in Quotations, Relics | Tagged relics | Leave a reply

"Enjoy it while you can"

words and images Posted on September 6, 2009 by dlschirfSeptember 6, 2009

A young man passing by said to me, “Enjoy it while you can. Only two days left!” At first I thought he meant the pool, which may remain open as long as the weather holds out. Then I thought he meant summer, which, according to some calendars, ends with Labor Day. If he had excellent eyesight (better than mine, corrected), he may have been referring to Bristol Renaissance Faire, which is mentioned on my t shirt and which concludes tomorrow. I’m leaning toward the latter because of the oddness of the comment, shot at a stranger on the other side of a fence, and the way he was looking back at me when I glanced up, as though he were checking to see if I’d gotten the joke.

It does remind me that not everyone shares my view that summer is over only with the autumnal equinox.

When does your summer end?

Posted in Quotations, Weather | 4 Replies

John Adams on age

words and images Posted on June 18, 2009 by dlschirfSeptember 19, 2018

From John Adams by David McCullough, in a passage about a possible Adams candidacy for US president:

When [Abigail] reminded [John] that he was sixty years old, he replied, “If I were near I would soon convince you that I am not above forty.”

Posted in Books, Quotations | Leave a reply

Snippets from life

words and images Posted on May 2, 2009 by dlschirfJanuary 4, 2019

Capitalists in the making

College female 1: . . . a concept for class. That’s how Jamba Juice was created.
College female 2: Oh, wow.

When reviewers need editors

This is a book that every single parent needs to read.

Book review

[That’s single as in every parent, not as in every unmarried parent.]

Something old, something new

DUDE, WE WERE ON FIRE!

Chicago History Museum headline

Poetry in transit

My love for you is like a shiny heart-shaped metaphor about the sea.

Metra sign

Phone sex?

Take it off vibrate. I don’t pay for that.

Women speaking into her mobile phone

Capitalism redux

We have swine flu masks! We have Hallmark cards for Mom!

Electronic sign at Walgreens

College doesn’t equal smart

Some students purge or starve so they can binge drink.

RedEye

For when video games can’t keep them entertained

Offered by the Illinois Tollway at oases: The popular Captain Tollway coloring book

Whatever happened to “Billy” and “Susie”?

Willow! Montana!

Dad calling his children

When your marriage is as comfy as an old shoe

Elderly couple at the bus stop discussing the man’s choice of gym shoes:

Woman: Is there any reason you made that weird decision?
Man: If it aggravates you, that’s reason enough.

Taking the high road to higher education with no pit stops

Dedicated to the enlightenment of the human spirit
NO PUBLIC RESTROOMS

Window sign at Roosevelt University

Capitalist dreams, part III

If I major in econ. and work on Wall Street, I could be your sugar mama!

College student on mobile phone in elevator
Posted in Blog, Quotations | Tagged behavior, humor, life, quotation, words | 2 Replies

D. H. Lawrence quotations

words and images Posted on February 18, 2008 by dlschirfApril 16, 2019

From St. Mawr by D. H. Lawrence.

Lou:

As far as people go, my heart is quite broken. As far as people go, I don’t want any more. I can’t stand any more. What heart I ever had for it — for life with people — is quite broken. I want to be alone, mother: with you here, and Phoenix perhaps to look after horses and drive a car. But I want to be by myself, really.

Mrs. Witt:

I’m convinced that ever since men and women were men and women, people who took things seriously, and had time for it, got their hearts broken. Haven’t I had mine broken? It’s as sure as having your virginity broken: and it amounts to about as much. It’s a beginning rather than an end.

Lou:

I’ve got to live for something that matters, way down in me. And I think sex would matter to my very soul, if it was really sacred. But cheap sex kills me . . . I dislike [men] because they’re not men enough: babies, and playboys, and poor things showing off all the time, even to themselves. I don’t say I’m any better. I only wish, with all my soul, that some men were bigger and stronger and deeper than I am . . . No, mother, of this I am convinced: either my taking a man shall have a meaning and a mystery that penetrates my very soul, or I will keep to myself . . . And to [the spirit that is wild], my sex is deep and sacred, deeper than I am, with a deep nature aware deep down of my sex.

Posted in Blog, Quotations | Tagged D. H. Lawrence, quotation | Leave a reply

Updike quotation

words and images Posted on January 19, 2008 by dlschirfJanuary 4, 2019

He understood that shivering better now. He was the conduit, the open window, by which, on rare occasions, she felt the ventus Dei. In the center of her sensuality, she was God’s plaything.

John Updike, “Love Song, for a Moog Synthesizer”
Posted in Blog, Quotations | Tagged quotation | Leave a reply

Post navigation

← Older posts

Recent Posts

  • Future of artificial limbs (prosthetics)
  • Hodge, 2001 – 2013 (cat)
  • “Far more happier” (The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes)
  • Pileated woodpecker pair at Sapsucker Woods
  • Eternal flame waterfall at Chestnut Ridge

Top Posts & Pages

  • Top 10 reasons Commander Riker walks with his head tilted
  • Book review: Zitkala-Sa: American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings
  • Memories of South Shore Plaza, Hamburg, New York
  • Wopsononock Mountain, or Wopsy, in Blair County, Pennsylvania
  • Book review: Women in Love
  • Relics: The newsstand
  • Book review: Henry and June
  • Book Reviews
  • Sunset from Coffee Creek Park in Chesterton, Indiana
  • Horseshoe Curve National Historic Site, Tytoona Natural Area Cave Preserve

Archives

Other realms

  • BookCrossing
  • Facebook
  • Goodreads
  • Instagram
  • LibraryThing
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Good viewing

  • Art of John Taft
  • bensozia
  • Bill of the Birds (no longer updated)
  • BrontëBlog
  • Edge
  • Karen Winters Fine Art
  • Mental Floss
  • Musical Assumptions
  • National Geographic News
  • Orange Crate Art
  • Sexy Archaeology
  • The Creative Journey
  • The Introvert's Corner
  • The Pen Addict
  • The Raucous Royals
  • Thrilling Days of Yesteryear
  • Woodclinched
  • World-O-Crap

BOINC Stats

Copyright © 1996–2023 Diane Schirf. Photographs and writing mine unless noted.
↑