The Whole Wide Wonderland

"The world is ours, ours for the taking.
Yes there's scars, it's our hearts your breaking.
The world is ours, ours for a little while.
Yes there's scars, it's easy love just sit a while.
The world is ours, ours for the taking.
Yes there's scars, but nothing that a little love won't heal."
from 'Trust' by Seabird

If only we were wonderstruck

"It is an incalculable added pleasure to any one's sum of happiness
if he or she grows to know, even slightly and imperfectly,
how to read and enjoy the wonder-book of nature."

"it is also vandalism wantonly to destroy or to permit the destruction
of what is beautiful in nature, whether it be a cliff, a forest, or a species of mammal or bird.
Here in the United States we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping-grounds,
we pollute the air, we destroy forests, and exterminate fishes, birds and mammals
-- not to speak of vulgarizing charming landscapes with hideous advertisements.
But at last it looks as if our people were awakening."
President Theodore Roosevelt

The D.P. {Displaced Person}

"Then she stood a while longer, reflecting,
her unseeing eyes directly in front of the peacock's tail.
He had jumped into the tree and his tail hung in front of her,
full of fierce planets with eyes that were each ringed in green
and set against a sun that was gold in one second's light
and salmon-colored in the next. She might have been looking
at a map of the universe but she didn't notice it any more than she did
the spots of sky that cracked the dull green of the tree."

"'As far as I'm concerned,' she said and glared at him fiercely,
'Christ was just another D.P.'"

"Of all the things she resented about him,
she resented the most that he hadn't left of his own accord."
from The Displaced Person by Flannery O'Connor

Thrifty Edits

The Personal Fable

“Above all, do not lie to yourself.
A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where
he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him,
and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others.
Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love,
he gives himself up to the passions and coarse pleasures, in order
to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete bestiality,
and it all comes from lying continually to others and to himself.”
from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky