From a while back: Rivers, blood vessels, tree branches and tree roots.

"Brothers, love is a teacher . . . it is dearly bought, it is won slowly by long labour. For we must love not only occasionally, for a moment, but for ever. Everyone can love occasionally, even the wicked can." Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Flim-Flam Man Hilarious movie. George C. Scott plays Mordecai C. Jones (a self-styled "M.B.S., C.S., D.D. — Master of Back-Stabbing, Cork-Screwing and Dirty-Dealing!") a drifting confidence trickster who makes his living defrauding people in the southern United States.

"My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain." W. H. Auden

Herman Melville, excavator of the human soul. "Melville was left to consort with the ghosts of men who had died hundreds of years before—they alone affording him that sense of spiritual affinity which he sought vainly in the universe of the living." Stanley Geist

"In music a man can let himself go. In words he always remains a bit stiff and unconvincing." H. L. Mencken

March 6 & June 13

"The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. 'All is vanity'. ALL." Herman Melville

“So far gone am I in the dark side of the earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me.” Captain Ahab

"There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces.” Herman Melville

Dorothea Lange

Nice catch! Thurman Munson holding his 4 month old daughter Tracy, 1970.

"I think the greatest curse of American society has been the idea of an easy millennialism -- that some new drug, or the next election or the latest in social engineering will solve everything." Robert Penn Warren

The ever terse Calvin Coolidge: One Sunday a friend met him and asked, "Where are you coming from?" "Church." "Did you enjoy the sermon?" "Yep." "What was it about?" "Sin." "What did the pastor say about sin?" "He was against it."

"The first use of good literature is that it prevents a man from being merely modern. To be merely modern is to condemn oneself to an ultimate narrowness; just as to spend one’s last earthly money on the newest hat is to condemn oneself to the old-fashioned. The road of the ancient centuries is strewn with dead moderns. Literature, classic and enduring literature, does its best work in reminding us perpetually of the whole round of truth and balancing other and older ideas against the ideas to which we might for a moment be prone." G. K. Chesterton Calm evening

"I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together . . . What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.” Mary Shelley on Frankenstein