“I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was” – Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children “And now let us welcome the new year, full of things that never were.” – Rainer Maria Rilke “We all want… Continue reading

Paris is always a good idea – The movie “Sabrina” America is my country and Paris is my hometown – Gertrude Stein If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable… Continue reading

“When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one that has opened for us.” – Alexander Graham Bell “Attitude is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than what people do or say. It… Continue reading

http://www.gashbag.com/submarinersprayer.htm In the beginning there was a word; and the word was God.  All else was darkness and void without form. So God created the heavens and the earth. He created the sun and the moon and the stars, so that light may pierce the darkness.  The earth, God divided between the land and the… Continue reading

“It is not worthwhile to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man’s character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible. “- Mark Twain “To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.” – Samuel Butler “Boy, when… Continue reading

The utter devastation that has been visited on Japan is heart-rending. I fear the death toll will do nothing but rise for the next few weeks. My mind boggles at the damage that is slowly being revealed. I am doing the only thing that I know to do, and that is to donate to the… Continue reading

Speaking in the King Hussein Mosque in Amman, he argued that religion was a force for good, but its “manipulation” caused divisions and even violence. – Benedict XVI “I think it’s perfectly possible to explain how the universe came about without bringing God into it, but I don’t know everything, and there may well be a… Continue reading

“A grove of giant redwoods or sequoias should be kept just as we keep a great or beautiful cathedral. The extermination of the passenger pigeon meant that mankind was just so much poorer; exactly as in the case of the destruction of the cathedral at Rheims. And to lose the chance to see frigate-birds soaring… Continue reading

“The [DADT] policy is an absurdity and borderline on being an obscenity. What it does is cause people to ask of themselves that they lie to themselves, that they pretend to be something that they are not. There is no empirical evidence that would indicate that it affects military cohesion. There is a lot of… Continue reading