“Anything not worth doing is worth
  not doing well. Think about it.”– Elias Schwartz
“Reality is that which,
when you stop believing in it,
doesn’t go away.”
— Philip K. Dick
“He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head
is a craftsman. He who works with his hands
and his head and his heart is an artist.”
–St. Francis, religious leader
Quote of the Day
I’ve been reading The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams, who, besides being friends with Henry and William James, and the whole Emerson family, was the grandson of John Quincy Adams, and thus the great grandson of John Adams. Speaking of himself and school, he said:
“He hated it because he was herded together with a crowd of boys and compelled to learn by memory a quantity of things that did not amuse him.”
I think that’s a real gem, but to unearth one of these, you have to wade through hours of tedious first-person history of the Union’s legation to England during the Civil War.
Here at Asparagus Pee, we’re very thorough, so we went back in time and asked Marcel Proust if he had any comments on our blog, and he said:
My greatest pleasure was the asparagus, bathed in ultramarine and pink and whose spears, delicately brushed in mauve and azure, fade imperceptibly to the base of the stalk—still soiled with the earth of their bed—through iridescences that are not of this world. It seemed to me that these celestial nuances betrayed the delicious creatures that had amused themselves by becoming vegetables and which, through the disguise of their firm, edible flesh, gave a glimpse in these dawn-born colors, these rainbow sketches, this extinction of blue evenings, of the precious essence that I would still recognize when, all night following a dinner where I had eaten them, they played in their crude, poetic farces, like one of Shakespeare’s fairies, at changing my chamberpot into a bottle of perfume.
— Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
Whatever.
Words to live by
“One of the greatest labor-saving inventions of
today is tomorrow.” — Vincent T. Foss
A Hole is to Dig
The Lady Janet bought this great old childrens’ book from 1957 called A Hole is to Dig by Ruth Krauss, who also wrote The Carrot Seed, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak. (You could do worse for an illustrator.)
It has these wonderful “operational” definitions, mostly by Kindergarteners, like “A face is so you can make faces,” or “Toes are to wiggle.” Here is a quote from this wonderful book:
“A tablespoon is to eat a table with.”