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)

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

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

First Land by Craig Kosak

Birds moved through the human world at will. In their large freedom they lived rich lives in parallel with people and people hardly knew. — John James Audubon 

The Quilting Bee, 19th Century Americana by Morgan Weistling

We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others. — Michel de Montaigne, Of the inconsistency of our actions (1572-1574)

Tawny by Mort Solberg

An owl sound wandered along the road with me. 

I didn’t hear it—I breathed it into my ears. — William Stafford