Certain words can change your brain forever and ever so you do have to be very careful about it.
“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, from The Left Hand of Darkness
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet
“And maybe that’s all I wanted—to be asked a question and have it cover me, like a roof the width of myself.”
— Ocean Vuong, from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
“[…] the openness to revelation. Which is another way of saying, to being wrong about what is possible and true.”
— Karen Russell, from “The Ghost Birds”
But, anyway, aren’t there moments that are better than knowing something, and sweeter?
— Mary Oliver, from “Snowy Night”
“In the end I would rather wonder than know.”
— Mary Ruefle, from “On Secrets,” in Madness, Rack, and Honey
Australian Birds Collection
Sulphur Crested Cockatoo & Golden Wattle
NH Honeyeater & Banksia
Laughing Kookaburra & Eucalyptus
I’ve always wanted to animate something sheep-related and here it is.
There will be more, but animation is very time consuming.
“Before I die, I want to be somebody’s favorite hiding place, the place they can put everything they know they need to survive, every secret, every solitude, every nervous prayer, and be absolutely certain I will keep it safe. I will keep it safe.”
– Andrea Gibson
[image id: a four-page comic. it is titled “immortality” after the poem by clare harner (more popularly known as “do not stand at my grave and weep”). the first page shows paleontologists digging up fossils at a dig. it reads, “do not stand at my grave and weep. i am not there. i do not sleep.” page two features several prehistoric creatures living in the wild. not featured but notable, each have modern descendants: horses, cetaceans, horsetail plants, and crocodilians. it reads, “i am a thousand winds that blow. i am the diamond glints on snow. i am the sunlight on ripened grain. i am the gentle autumn rain.” the third page shows archaeopteryx in the treetops and the skies, then a modern museum-goer reading the placard on a fossil display. it reads, “when you awaken in the morning’s hush, i am the swift uplifting rush, of quiet birds in circled flight. i am the soft stars that shine at night. do not stand at my grave and cry.” the fourth page shows a chicken in a field. it reads, “i am not there. i did not die” / end id]
a comic i made in about 15 hours for my school’s comic anthology. the theme was “evolution”
I've finally finished this one! An untidy, yet cosy fantasy/sci-fi bookshop, with a stack of old paperbacks on the counter.
Prints available here
This is Papa, one of the most popular stray cats living in the Palace Museum in Beijing, China.
Beautiful from Ordinary Days
Some of my favorite responses to this post so far.
To celebrate Quentin Blake’s’s 90th birthday and support the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration I drew this image for the #90Candles project. You can see and buy all the images at www.qbcentre.org.uk/90-candles
