The Art of Adventure

"The headlong run-on fragment dangling its feet over the edge" A Bibliophile's Journey

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“I said, in talking, that I felt more and more the time wasted that is not spent in Ireland.” – Lady Gregory

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“When I come out on the road of a morning, when I have had a night's sleep and perhaps a breakfast, and the sun lights a hill on the distance, a hill I know I shall walk across an hour or two thence, and it is green and silken to my eye, and the clouds have begun their slow, fat rolling journey across the sky, no land in the world can inspire such love in a common man.”

—Frank Delaney, Ireland

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I Went Out to Hear

Leila Chatti

The sound of quiet. The sky

indigo, steeping

deeper from the top, like tea.

In the absence

of anything else, my own

breathing became obscene.

I heard the beating

of bats’ wings before

the air troubled above

my head, turned to look

and saw them gone.

On the surface of the black

lake, a swan and the moon

stayed perfectly

still. I knew this was

a perfect moment.

Which would only hurt me

to remember and never

live again. My God. How lucky to have lived

a life I would die for.

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De tous leys moyens d'expression, la photographie est le seul qui fixe un instant precis. Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes a precise moment in time.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

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"...and I looked upon the world with all the innocence and wonder of a newborn babe. And now, if I am sad, or filled with sudden rage, I find some quiet place with grass and leaves and earth, and sit there silently and hope that they will come and call me, with their silvery voices, and make me clean again, those little angels of the trees and flowers."

Jane Goodall

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i don't pay attention to the world ending. it has ended for me many times and began again in the morning.

nayyirah.waheed

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"Spend the years of learning squandering Courage for the years of wandering Through a world politely turning From the loutishness of learning" Samuel Beckett

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"For Christianity, the intellectual is always passing away, valid but provisional, subject to complete relativization in the face of the divine; the wisdom of the world may be revealed as foolishness at any moment. Thus Aquinas, in the midst of one of the greatest works of philosophy and theology in human history, saw a vision from God and ceased his work..."

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"I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where edges meet. I like shorelines, weather fronts, international borders. There are interesting frictions and incongruities in these places, and often, if you stand at the point of tangency, you can see both sides better than if you were in the middle of either one." Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

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"Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars and see yourself running with them." Marcus Aurelius

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"Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light." Frida Kahlo

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My Fourth of July is from childhood,

Childhood itself a kind of country, too.

It’s a place that’s far from me now,

A place I'd like to visit again.

The Fourth of July takes me there.

In that childhood place and border place

The Fourth of July, like everything else,

It meant more than just one thing.

—Alberto Ríos

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What can we make of the inexpressible joy of children? It is a kind of gratitude, I think—the gratitude of the ten-year-old who wakes to her own energy and the brisk challenge of the world. You thought you knew the place and all its routines, but you see you hadn’t known. Whole stacks at the library held books devoted to things you knew nothing about. The boundary of knowledge receded, as you poked about in books, like Lake Erie’s rim as you climbed its cliffs. And each area of knowledge disclosed another, and another. Knowledge wasn’t a body, or a tree, but instead air, or space, or being—whatever pervaded, whatever never ended and fitted into the smallest cracks and the widest space between stars.

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood

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Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

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Isn't it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me feel glad to be alive--it's such an interesting world. It wouldn't be half so interesting if we knew all about everything, would it? There'd be no scope for imagination then, would there?

L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

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A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later years … the alienation from the sources of our strength.

Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder

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I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love.

Alice Walker, The Color Purple