Indoors Outdoors

Thanks to my friend Nikki for sharing this one:
Sunshine in the Living Room, 1910–1912
by Peter Ilsted (1861 - 1933)

So beautiful to read indoors on a late Spring day . . .
equally lovely to sit outside . . .

Springtime or The Reader, 1872
by Claude Monet (1840 – 1926)

Taurus ~ Shakespeare's Birthday

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Gemini ~ My Birthday
An excellent birthday quote that most likely remains
true no matter what the ages in question:

"The truth is, your mother doesn't know any more
about being forty than you do about being twenty."
from A: A Novel ~ by Alan Lindsay

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Reading selection for a lush afternoon:
Rules of Civility ~ by Amor Towles

A few favorite passages:
93: "'Absolutely.'

"A neutral observer would probably have raised an eyebrow at my answer. There wasn't much jingle in my delivery, and one-word responses just have that way of not sounding very convincing. But the thing of it is, I meant it. Every one word of it."

156: "Dicky . . . took relative pride and absolute joy in weaving together the strands of his life so that when he gave them a good tug all the friends of friends of friends would come tumbling through the door."
[Similar to Mrs. Dalloway!]

323-24: "Life doesn't have to provide you any options at all. It can easily define your course from the outset and keep you in check through all manner of rough and subtle mechanics. To have even one year when you're presented with choices that can alter your circumstances, your character, your course -- that's by the grace of God alone. And it shouldn't come without a price. . . . I know that right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallizes loss."

P.S.
"You have learned something.
That always feels at first
as if you have lost something." 

from Major Barbara
by George Bernard Shaw