A PORTRAIT A DAY KEEPS MYSELF SANE

“The people in the world, and the objects in it, and the world as a whole, are not absolute things, but on the contrary, are the phenomena of perception… If we were all alike: if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi, in unison, One poet would be enough… But we are not alone, and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others. This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things.”
― Wallace Stevens

I love the night passionately. I love it as I love my country, or my mistress, with an instinctive, deep, and unshakeable love. I love it with all my senses: I love to see it, I love to breathe it in, I love to open my ears to its silence, I love my whole body to be caressed by its blackness. Skylarks sing in the sunshine, the blue sky, the warm air, in the fresh morning light. The owl flies by night, a dark shadow passing through the darkness; he hoots his sinister, quivering hoot, as though he delights in the intoxicating black immensity of space.
Guy de Maupassant

I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky; and all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.
John Masefield

The next day the two sisters went to the ball, and so did Cinderella, but dressed more magnificently than before. The King’s son was always by her side, and his pretty speeches to her never ceased.
Charles Perrault

America, when it became known to Europeans, was, as it had long been, a scene of wide-spread revolution.
Francis Parkman

It was a dark and stormy night…

Edward George Bulwer-Lytton