Quotes

A statue isn’t built from the ground up — it’s chiseled out of a block of marble — and I often wonder if we aren’t likewise shaped by the qualities we lack, outlined by the empty space where the marble used to be. I’ll be sitting on a train. I’ll be lying awake in bed. I’ll be watching a movie; I’ll be laughing. And then, all of a sudden, I’ll be struck with the paralyzing truth: It’s not what we do that makes us who are. It’s what we don’t do that defines us.

Raphael Bob-Waksberg, Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory

“Take me to a diner where the coffee is strong, the waitresses call you honey, the gossip is juicy and I’ll eat all the mediocre food that is on the menu.”

Going to Rome again.

Excited and nervous.

I want to absorb it all

The old architecture.

The energy of the natives

“I think that whenever we give our pen some free will, we may surprise ourselves. All that wanting to seem normal in regular life, all that fitting in falls away in the face of one’s own strange self on the page……

Reminding myself that no one else would ever see what I wrote—with my ballpoint pen in my wide-ruled spiral notebook—helped me be less censored and less afraid. Later, I could decide to show or not, because whether anyone ever read it was not the most important thing.

Writing or making anything—a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake—has self-respect in it. You’re working. You’re trying. You’re not lying down on the ground, having given up.

And one thing I love about writing is that we can speak to the absent, the dead, the estranged and the longed-for—all the people we’re separated from. We can see them again, understand them more, even say goodbye.”

– Sharon Olds

I’ve had Amaryllis rebloom for many years. Wait till the flowers on the stalk have died. Cut back the stalk which is hollow but allow the other leaves to grow over the summer. You may get more than one stalk come up which carries the blooming flowers. In the late summer cut all the leaves down to the level of the bulb. Then either take the bulb out, rub off the compost, and store it in newspaper in a cardboard box in a dry cool place. Keep it sleeping for six to eight weeks or more if it suits you. Then put the bulb in fresh compost in the flower pot. Water. Leave it in a warm sunny spot and watch it grow again. If the bulb gets too big to take it out the pot, which will eventually happen, just remove as much soil as you can, and put the newspaper on top of the bulb and scrunch it down. I have about 20 Amaryllis of various colours and enjoy watching them grow over the winter and early spring. They then provide leaves over the summer which feed the bulb and I put them in my front porch in big cardboard boxes to sleep in the early autumn. This year they are getting a longer sleep so that I can enjoy them when I come back from holiday. It is always a joy to see them come back year after year. You don’t say goodbye to them, you say, lovely having you, see you next year.