“We are chained by our own control. Life is nothing more than finding the key that unlocks every part of our soul.”

― Shannon L. Alder

 

 



Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? (Sonnet 18)

William Shakespeare, 1564 - 1616

 

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
     So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
     So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

“For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.”

― Eric Roth, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Screenplay

 

 

 

 



“Things as they appear every day and as they are engraved in our memory, facts and occurrences as they are perceived by senses, create an intricate labyrinth in the mind. The way how things are experienced in our environment and how they react in the arsenal of our imagination, creates a torrent of inspiring ideas that flood the speedy highways of our brains.

 " Labyrinth of the mind " 
― Erik Pevernagie

 

 



 

“Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered I have fought my way here to the castle beyond the Goblin City to take back the child you have stolen, for my will is as strong as yours and my kingdom as great. You have no power over me!”

― Jim Henson

 

 



 

“Failure is not the end of the road, its a stepping stone to do better!”

 
― Hopal Green

 

 



“The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion; and so let all young persons take their choice.”  

― William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

 

 



 

“Incidentally, the world is magical.
Magic is simply what's off our human scale... at the moment.”

― Vera Nazarian,    

The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration.

 

 



“The river is such a tranquil place, a place to sit and think of romance and the beauty of nature, to enjoy the elegance of swans and the chance of a glimpse of a kingfisher.”

― Jane Wilson-Howarth, Snowfed Waters

 

 



When my cats aren't happy, I'm not happy. Not because I care about their mood but because I know they're just sitting there thinking up ways to get even.

 

Percy Bysshe Shelley

 

 

RIP Sapphire.



 

“All forests are one... They are all echoes of the first forest that gave birth to Mystery when the world began.”

― Charles de Lint, Spiritwalk

 

 



"I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines."

-  Henry David Thoreau,  1817 - 1862  

 

 



“Nature is one of the most underutilized treasures in life. It has the power to unburden hearts and reconnect to that inner place of peace.”

― Janice Anderson

 

 



When stuck years ago in a job I hated, my only friend was the public bench. As the tedious mornings dragged on, how I would long for the lunch hour, when I would be able to escape the torture of the office and stroll over to the churchyard and into the comforting wooden embrace of one of its benches.

 

Tom Hodgkinson
 



It took me time to understand my water lilies. I had planted them for the pleasure of it; I grew them without ever thinking of painting them.

 

Claude Monet





“The road to Manderley lay ahead. There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.”

― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

 

 



“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.”

― John Lubbock, The Use Of Life

 

 



 

Vague memories hang about the mind like cobwebs...

 

George Elliot

 

 



“The coast is an edgy place. Living on the coast presents certain stark realities and a wild, rare beauty. Continent confronts ocean. Weather intensifies. It's a place of tide and tantrum; of flirtations among fresh- and saltwaters, forests and shores; of tense negotiations with an ocean that gives much but demands more. Every year the raw rim that is this coast gets hammered and reshaped like molten bronze. This place roils with power and a sometimes terrible beauty. The coast remains youthful, daring, uncertain about tomorrow. The guessing, the risk; in a way, we're all thrill seekers here.”

 
― Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World

 

 

 

 

 

 



“Nothing in the world is quite as adorably lovely as a robin when he shows off and they are nearly always doing it.”

― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden



“All forests have their own personality. I don't just mean the obvious differences, like how an English woodland is different from a Central American rain forest, or comparing tracts of West Coast redwoods to the saguaro forests of the American Southwest... they each have their own gossip, their own sound, their own rustling whispers and smells. A voice speaks up when you enter their acres that can't be mistaken for one you'd hear anyplace else, a voice true to those particular trees, individual rather than of their species.”

― Charles de Lint, The Onion Girl

 



“She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum.” 

 
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

 

 



“All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes -- characters even -- caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.”

― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

 

 



 

“It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.”

― William Faulkner



 

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”

  
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

 

 



“Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

 

 

 

 

 



“Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

 

 



On this June day the buds in my garden are almost as enchanting as the open flowers. Things in bud bring, in the heat of a June noontide, the recollection of the loveliest days of the year, those days of May when all is suggested, nothing yet fulfilled.     

Francis King

 



It is the month of June, The month of leaves and roses, When pleasant sights salute the eyes and pleasant scents the noses.

Nathaniel Parker Willis

 



“You get no writing done at all if you sit at a table with a view. You'd spent the whole time watching the birds or thinking about what you would like to be doing out of doors, instead of flogging yourself to work out of sheer boredom.”  

― Mary Stewart

 

 

 

The Hurlers

Some 150 prehistoric stone circles have been identified in England, of which 16 are to be found on Bodmin Moor, the largest of the Cornish granite uplands. Of these, The Hurlers are the most fascinating.

 

The close grouping of three Late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age stone circles is extremely rare in England, but a grouping of three such regular circles is unique.

 

The monument, which was excavated in the 1930s, consists of three adjacent stone circles aligned north-east to south-west. To the west is a pair of outlying upright stones standing close together, known as the Pipers.

 

Of the northern circle 15 original stones are visible, and excavation revealed the buried holes for a further ten, now represented by marker stones. The regular spacing of the stones suggests there would have been five more, giving 30 in all.

 

A strip of granite paving, found in excavation, ran between this and the central circle.

The central circle, the best preserved of the three, has 14 original stones and 14 markers. All the stones were hammered smooth, and the chippings were deposited nearby. The southern circle, which has not been excavated, is the least well preserved: it has nine original stones of which seven have fallen.

 

Stone robbing has damaged all the circles to some extent, while the introduction of cattle on to Bodmin Moor has resulted in many of the stones falling over: cows use them as scratching posts, eroding the ground and undermining them.

 

The small pits visible within the southern and central circles, and a slight bank crossing the central circle, are the remains of post-medieval tin mining.

 

The monument forms one element in an extensive grouping of later Neolithic and Bronze Age ceremonial and funerary monuments on this part of Bodmin Moor, and the circles are directly aligned with some of these.

 

The axis through the centres of the two northern circles aligns directly on the massive Rillaton Barrow, visible on the skyline to the north-east, while the axis of the southern pair of circles in turn aligns directly with a prehistoric round cairn to the south-west.

 

Another line at right angles to this axis through the central circle takes in another stone circle, an embanked avenue and a stone row. Such circles are likely to have had considerable ritual importance for the societies that used them.

 

A local legend identifies The Hurlers as men who were turned to stone for playing the ancient game of hurling on a Sunday. The two isolated stones of the Pipers are said to be the figures of two men who played tunes on a Sunday and suffered the same fate.

 

 

 

 



 

Merlin's Cave is the name given to a cave located beneath Tintagel Castle, 5 kilometres south-west of Boscastle, Cornwall. It is 100 metres long, passing completely through Tintagel Island from Tinagel Haven on the east to West Cove on the west.

 

 



“And so, perhaps, the truth winds somewhere between the road to Glastonbury, Isle of the Priests, and the road to Avalon, lost forever in the mists of the Summer Sea.” 

 
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

 



“Some ruins of ancient times are much more beautiful than the best buildings of modern eras!”

― Mehmet Murat ildan

 

 



“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

  
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

 



“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

  
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings