t.pleman Art @tcookert - Tumblr Blog

🦣 Bountiful Ridge Nurseries: . Princess Anne, Md.: Bountiful Ridge Nurseries, 1936.. Original source Image description: Historical illustration from Bountiful Ridge Nurseries, 1936, depicting five fruits: a large red “Gallia Beauty—Red Rome” apple, described as “The Rome Type Apple at Its Best”; a yellow Bartlett pear with green leaves labeled as a commercial standard; and three red strawberries labeled “Mastodon” (ever-bearing, large, delicious, productive), “Chesapeake” (called the aristocrat of strawberries), and “WM. Belt” (noted for quality and popularity in the North). Each fruit is detailed in vibrant color with accompanying text highlighting their qualities for growers.

yama-bato

Hertha Kluge-Pott

Self Portrait

sour-echinacea

“i just happen to think millionaires have some sort of lacking in their … in their elasticity.”

ondeadpeasantgirls

By which I mean not a "good" writer or a "bad" writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

-Joan Didion, Why I write (1976)

reverie-quotes

I had by all objective accounts a "normal" and a "happy" family situation, and yet I was almost thirty years old before I could talk to my family on the phone without crying after I had hung up. We did not fight. Nothing was wrong. And yet some nameless anxiety colored the emotional charges between me and the place that I came from.

— Joan Didion, "On Going Home"

reverie-quotes

New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of "living" there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not "live" at Xanadu.

— Joan Didion, "Goodbye to All That"

truenoodle

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course we will play Francesca to Paolo, Brett Ashley to Jake, Helen Keller to anyone's Annie Sullivan: no expectation is too misplaced, no rôle too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we can not but hold in contempt, we play rôles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.