The moment when one thing turns into another is the most beautiful moment.
-Vic Muniz

The trouble is, you think you have time.
-Buddha

Beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it.
-Muriel Barbery

What are men to rocks and mountains?
—Jane Austen

Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.
– Jeanette Winterson

Still round the corner there may wait / A new road or a secret gate.
– J. R. R. Tolkien

The Fog Horn

From the cliffs at Land’s End,
where the sea is full of horses,
the jaunty headlands of Marin slowly disappear.
The fog sloughs in on ancient feet;
The bay is wrapped in elephant’s Skin.
All is mute and gray, dormant, damp and dim,
when water droplets hang in air
like thick mouthfuls of unsaid prayers.
But clap the helm when the foghorn sounds,
It sounds a lusty blast and raises up
the shroud of day with hollowed,
hungry notes—away!

Do I dare / Disturb the universe?
—T. S. Eliot

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious
in the years of maturity.
-Albert Einstein

Into The Sea

The old fisherman at day’s end,
his deck scrubbed, catch on ice,
profit spent on fuel and bait and rent,
sat at the bar, his big hand bent
on a glass of Irish whiskey,
and with his arms, spotted and scarred
from a sailor’s life in the shipwreck sun
and knuckles cursed by salt,
the cruel rigging of his craft
and the dark harness of an empty sea,
he lifted drink to peeling lips
and whispered, “Jesus Christ—”
It was his last long cast into the sea.