“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“We can imagine the books we’d like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries full of books we would like to possess, even if they are well beyond our reacher, because we enjoy dreaming up a library that reflects every one of our interests and every one of our foibles–a library that, in its variety and complexity, fully reflects the reader we are.”
Alberto Manguel , The Library at Night
Photo by J. Stephenson
“Most things are forgotten over time. Even the war itself, the life-and-death struggle people went through is now like something from the distant past. We’re so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about everyday, too many new things we have to learn. But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone.”
Haruki Murakami
“Woman’s role in creation should be parallel to her role in life. I don’t mean the good earth. I mean the bad earth too, the demon, the instincts, the storms of nature. Tragedies, conflicts, mysteries are personal. Man fabricated a detachment which became fatal. Woman must not fabricate. She must descend into the real womb and expose its secrets and its labyrinths. She must describe it as the city of Fez, with its Arabian Nights gentleness, tranquility and mystery. She must describe the voracious moods, the desires, the worlds contained in each cell of it. For the womb has dreams. It is not as simple as the good earth. I believe at times that man created art out of fear of exploring woman. I believe woman stuttered about herself out of fear of what she had to say. She covered herself with taboos and veils. Man invented a woman to suit his needs. He disposed of her by identifying her with nature and then paraded his contemptuous domination of nature. But woman is not nature only.
She is the mermaid with her fish-tail dipped in the unconscious.”
James Abbot McNeill Whistler (1894-1903)
A Dancing woman in a Pink robe, seen from the back
Dance till the stars come down from the rafters
Dance, Dance, Dance till you drop.
~W.H. Auden
“I love to dance, it does not matter if it is a Tango, a Foxtrot, a Samba or a Jive, just like to move my body on the rhythm of music…I just can not sit still. Other people get their kick out of shopping, playing Foxy Bingo, or singing. But as for me, dancing is my thing. The dance floor has always been my comfort zone.
Dancing is a natural movement of the body and has always been popular! Personally I love the music of the roaring twenties, the swinging age…in music, dances, dresses and names like Heavenly Sugar and Shining Pearl.
