We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.
Henry David Thoreau (1817–62), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist. Walden,“Spring” (1854).
Rain Clouds Kennebunkport, Maine © Bob Orsillo
There’s always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.
Don DeLillo (b. 1926), U.S. author. James Axton, in The Names, ch. 12 (1982).
Calm Before the Storm - Kennebunkport, Maine
Nature, like man, sometimes weeps from gladness.
Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81), English statesman, author. Coningsby bk. 7, ch. 5 (1844).
Who knows what you will find as you roam the docks in Portland Maine.
I live in company with a body, a silent companion, exacting and eternal. He it is who notes that individuality which is the seal of the weakness of our race. My soul has wings, but the brutal jailer is strict.
Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), French artist. The Journal of Eugène Delacroix (tr. by Walter Pach, 1937), entry for 4 June 1824.
8.5×11 Epsom Print $35.
In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.
Lao-Tzu (6th century BC), Legendary Chinese philosopher. Tao-te-ching bk. 2, ch. 78 (tr. by T. C. Lau, 1963).
