WORK IN PROGRESS

WORK IN PROGRESS
...playing with the concepts of power and control...

I’m still coming down from the high of our 3500 mile road trip. We saw a lot and we talked -- sometimes at length -- with some interesting people. As a result, I’ve got a lot on my mind, some of it humorous, some of it sardonic, a lot of it poignant. It’s all in the works and, just like the accompanying image, it’s all “under construction.” While I sort out all my thoughts, I offer you some of my favorite quotes from overheard conversations and from my favorite reads. (Since I read on a Kindle, I can’t cite page references.) The collection is random...just excerpts that put my imagination into hyper-drive. I hope they’ll do the same for you.

---“He’s never been the same since his sex change operation.”
(Overheard on a walk)

--- That’s what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you..., and that tiny thing will lead you onto another book, and another bit there will lead you oto a third book. It’s geometrically progressive--all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.”
Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Annie Barrows

---“Metaphors be with you.”
Seen on a bumper sticker

---“Age is a terrible thief. Just when you’re getting the hang of life, it knocks your legs out from under you and stoops your back. It makes you ache and muddies your head and silently spreads cancer throughout your spouse.”
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

---“I didn’t realize yet that thinking without awareness is the main dilemma of human existence.”
A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle

---A character's margin notes about the Ten Commandments: “Word of God or crowd control???”
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Annie Barrows

---“‘We have art,’ Nietzsche said, ‘so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.’"
Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje

---“...there was nothing more assuring than a mask. Under the mask she could rewrite herself into any place, in any form. This is where I learned that sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.”
Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje

---“Art, he’d come to believe, was little more than the principle of one thing leading to another, whereas love, insofar as he understood it, depended on a thing remaining forever what it was, which in Noonan’s experience it militantly refused to do.”
Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo

---“The loss of place isn’t really so different from the loss of a person. Both disappear without permission....”

Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo

---“I’ve always wanted to be the person he believed me to be, which at times has kept me from being a better one. A terrible realization, this.”
Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo “

---"(Isn’t) that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted?”
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

---“I am SO ready to be outta here! I’m tired of people telling me what to do. I enlisted in the Marines.”
From one of my high school seniors, telling me of his post-graduation plans