2020, the year

“Turn her loose out of doors; give her good books, and leave her alone.

 You won't be disappointed in the woman who evolves.”

 Gene Stratton Porter

"Facts are fine, fer as they go… but they’re like water bugs skittering atop the water.

 Legends, now—they go deep down and bring up the heart of a story.”
from Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry

Once in a lifetime, perhaps, one escapes the actual confines of the flesh. Once in a lifetime, if one is lucky, one so merges with sunlight and air and running water that whole eons, the eons that mountains and deserts know, might pass in a single afternoon without discomfort. The mind has sunk away into its beginning among old roots and the obscure tricklings and movings that stir inanimate things.Like the charmed fairy circle into which a man once stepped, and upon emergence learned that the whole century had passed in a single night, one can never quite define the secret; but it has something to do, I am sure, with common water.
Loren Eiseley The Immense Journey

“The world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye,
which has also just opened and stretched out
to encompass everything, stared back at him.”
Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

“And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”

“Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.”

“The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.”

Kurt Vonnegut

“My gosh, if you’re going away, we got a million things to talk about! 

All the things we would’ve talked about next month, the month after! Praying mantises, zeppelins, acrobats, sword swallowers!”

 Dandelion Wine - Ray Bradbury

“Sometimes the cormorant stands first upon the rock and the heron comes after, sometimes the great blue heron rides the stone alone and along comes a cormorant and a slow dance begins. On this day the heron was surprised by the cormorant and performed annoyance postures until the right space was found between them.
Once the distance was ascertained they ignored each other”

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater