painted by Maurice Denis

When it rains, even the most insignificant puddle is a map of the universe.

— Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter

Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve. — Carol Shields

(Portrait of Katie Lewis (detail) by Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1886)

Hold up your hands before your eyes. You are looking at the hands of God. — Rabbi Lawrence Kushner

(Study of Hands by Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519)

Interiør. Den gamle bilæggerovn. Albertines Lyst, Lyngby, 1888, Vilhelm Hammershoi. Danish (1864 - 1916)

(via thebeldam)

Step Into the Light by Greg Beecham

This world we live in is but thickened light. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

La Bibliothèque de Prêt by Francis Masse

The streets were paved with words. — tatteredcover

Lady with a Unicorn by Raffaelo Sanzi, c. 1505

We are so far from denying there is any Unicorn at all, that we affirm there are many kinds thereof. — Thomas Browne

The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. — Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

Star Light by Kim Wiggins

Everything lives, moves, everything corresponds; the magnetic rays, emanating either from myself or from others, cross the limitless chain of things unimpeded; it is a transparent network that covers the world, and its slender threads communicate themselves by degrees to the planets and stars.  Captive now upon the earth, I commune with the chorus of the stars who share in my joys and sorrows. – Gerard de Nerval

Dance of the Wind and Storm by Thomas Blackshear

There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm. — Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark