“Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.”
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, especially William Wordsworth. (Wikipedia)
“He had been for many years, a quiet silent man, associating but little with other men, and used to companionship with his own thoughts. He had never known before the strength of the want in his heart for the frequent recognition of a nod, a look, a word; or the immense amount of relief that had been poured into it by drops through such small means.”
― Charles Dickens, Hard Times
Burghers of Calais (detail)
Auguste Rodin.
Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.
William Blake
William Blake (1757-1827)
Hecate or the Three Fates
Watercolor and pen and black ink
1795
When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the desire to mate every second of the day. It is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every part of your body. No… don’t blush. I am telling you some truths. For that is just being in love; which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over, when being in love has burned away… (Iannis to Pelagia)
CAPTAIN CORELLI’S MANDOLINE
Louis de Bernières
Painting by Kees van Dongen
“Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.”
― Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
Isaac Levitan (Lithuanian-Russian, 1860–1900)
Fog over Water, c. 1895.
