#Aralia cordata 'Sun King' #Tanacetum vulgare 'Isla Gold' Gold Leaf Tansy

#Rosa 'Olivia Rose Austin' Rosa 'AUSmixture' English breeder David Austin

#Darmera peltata

#Kordes ‘Jasmina’ #Rosa 'KORcentex' Arborose climbing rose German breeder W. Kordes

#Helleborus 'Wedding Bells' Lenten Rose

#Dicentra ‘White Gold’ Bleeding Heart

Planted you two years ago. Setting my eyes on you for the first time. #Clematis ‘Diamond Ball’

#Digitalis purpurea ‘Camelot Rose’

Caught the last peony for the season. #Paeonia 'Coral Charm’

#Ulysses #JamesJoyce Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes.

Finished #TheBookofDisquiet #FernandoPessoa External things…are to me as the world must have been to Christ when, looking down at everything, Satan tempted him. They are nothing, and I can understand why Christ wasn't tempted…I can't understand why clever old Satan thought they would be tempting.

#GeraldMurnane Gerald Murnane has been appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia for distinguished service to literature as an author and novelist, and to tertiary education. -Giramondo Publishing

#ÁguaViva #ClariceLispector “Because no one can hold me back now. I can still reason-I studied mathematics, which is the madness of reason-but now I want the plasma-l want to eat straight from the placenta."

#Melvill #RodrigoFresán “Lo, then I would wander far off, and remain in the wilderness. Selah. / I would hasten my escape from the windy storm and tempest," intones Allan Melvill…I ask what Selah means and my mother explains to me that it is a Hebrew term…that it could mean "stop and listen"….

#TheOdyssey #Homer #RobertFagles, translator “Telemachus, your comrades-at-arms are ready at the oars, waiting for your command to launch. So come, on with our voyage now, we're wasting time." And Pallas Athena sped away in the lead as he followed in her footsteps, man and goddess.

#AngelDown #DanielKraus all of Bagger's long-dead beliefs come back up for grabs… and Bagger fights it, he's taught himself to deny anything he can't touch, feel…and if angels existed, there's no reason one would come here, and Veck declares, "No, it needed to be here," and bows his head…

Finished #TheIliad #Homer #RobertFagles, translator They quickly lowered the chest in a deep, hollow grave …they shared a splendid funeral feast in Hector's honor, held in the house of Priam, king by will of Zeus. And so the Trojans buried Hector breaker of horses.

#Melvill #RodrigoFresán And who was it who said,says,will say this? It happens to me more and more:the feeling of capturing thoughts and ideas of others past or present…he says to himself…imposing a redemptive test…revisiting the things that can't be changed and that offer some modicum of security…

Finished #TheDirector #DanielKehlmann “Where did you think we got the extras? You've never heard of Maxglan?" Pabst rested his head in his hands. His vision had gone black. "There's nothing we can do. We didn't make it happen. We can't keep it from happening. It has nothing to do with us."

#Inland #GeraldMurnane “I learned that no thing in the world is one thing; that each thing in the world is two things at least, and probably many more than two things. I learned to find a queer pleasure in staring at a thing and dreaming of how many things it might be."

Finished #WhatAmIaDeer #PollyBarton this failure to pick up on his feelings of isolation…came directly from her ignorance and privilege…she was one of those people that needed to be told something in language to be able to perceive its truth and still then struggled to fully appreciate it as real.

Finished #TaiwanTravelogue #YangShuangzi “I've accepted my status as wild ginseng and have every plan to continue living my life as such. But Aoyama-san sees me as a pearl- and, if I'm understanding correctly, hopes that I can dress up as a more realistic ginseng." Her smile did not waver.

#Jasminum laurifolium Angel Wing Jasmine

Finished #SwannsWay #MarcelProust The reality that I had known no longer existed…The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. They were only a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time….

#Vitex agnus-castus Chaste tree

#AngelDown #DanielKraus feels for his haversack…extracts his Bible…opens it…stuffs his nose into the gutter…inhales…the damp protean smell of the book's red leather…the woody scratch of its onionskin pages, each one half-mooned by his father's finger-stains, has a smelling-salt effect on Bagger….

#TheIliad #Homer The majestic king of Troy slipped past…and kneeling down beside Achilles, clasped his knees and kissed his hands… Priam prayed his heart out to Achilles: "Remember your own father, great godlike Achilles— as old as I am…” And overpowered by memory both men gave way to grief.

#Illicium parviflorum 'Florida Sunshine’

#SwannsWay #MarcelProust …asked her to reconstruct for me the elements of that memory which I felt to belong to a particular distant year…it was forbidden me to ascend again the fatal slope…that longing which had itself become as inaccessible as the pleasure that it had once vainly pursued….

#GravitysRainbow #ThomasPynchon “This ascent will be betrayed to Gravity. But the Rocket engine, the deep cry of combustion that jars the soul, promises escape. The victim, in bondage to falling, rises on a promise, a prophecy, of Escape..."

#TheIliad #Homer So Hector shouted out to Deiphobus bearing his white shield—with a ringing shout he called for a heavy lance— but the man was nowhere near him, vanished— yes and Hector knew the truth in his heart… “My time has come! At last the gods have called me down to death.”

#TheBookofDisquiet #FernandoPessoa I was the daydream of what I wanted to be, and my dreaming began in my will: my goals were always the first fiction of what I never was…. Life would be unbearable if we were conscious of it.

#WhatAmIaDeer #PollyBarton You try to grasp the essence of the change…at some point you came to feel a very different way about how you looked and your obsessions…you wonder if actually everything that was waiting for you was already contained there…on the bare soles of your own grown feet.

#Rhapis excelsa Broadleaf Lady Palm

#TheDirector #DanielKehlmann At the crossroads they promise each other once again not to say anything. They certainly won't snitch, they'll definitely keep quiet! It's amazing, Jakob thinks, you can be as underhanded as you like—if you demand chivalry afterward, nothing will happen to you.

#TheIliad #Homer Now, when the famous crippled Smith had finished off that grand array of armor, lifting it in his arms he laid it all at the feet of Achilles' mother Thetis and down she flashed like a hawk from snowy Mount Olympus bearing the brilliant gear, the god of fire's gift.

#Cercis canadensis Redbud ‘Golden Falls’

#TaiwanTravelogue #YangShuangzi …I carefully appraised the remaining capacity of my stomach…I found myself buying some unknown, prickly fruit, a transaction made through charades-like gesturing that I decided to count as an auspicious beginning to my communication with the locals.

Finished #WomenWithoutMen #ShahrnushParsipur …Mahdokht would perch herself on this bed and contemplate not only the rivalry between the green of the trees and the pool water, but also the way the blue of the sky imposed itself, like the verdict of a divine judge, on the green of the orchard.

#Furcraea foetida 'Variegata' Variegated False Agave

#TheIliad #Homer #RobertFagles, translator …some boy at the seashore knocks sand castles down- he no sooner builds his playthings up, child’s play, than he wrecks them all with hands and kicking feet, just for the sport of it. God of the wild cry, Apollo- so you wrecked the Achaeans’ work….

#TheDirector #DanielKehlmann “…He’s a gentleman, she says. One of those men from the old days. When Vienna was still Vienna!” “And what is Vienna now?” He doesn’t answer. I try to remember. Something happened, but what? It begins to rain, drops of water drawing curved lines across the glass.

#WomenWithoutMen #ShahrnushParsipur She did not differentiate between earth and gravel, but she distinguished the earth from the sky. She had not seen the skies of the earth, but she knew there were earths of the sky.

Finished #Serotonin #MichelHouellebecq People never listen to the advice you give them…the advice one gives them plays exactly the same role…as that of the tragic choir, confirming to the hero that he has taken the path of destruction and chaos.

#TheBookofDisquiet #FernandoPessoa I had a certain talent for friendship, but I never had any friends, either because they simply didn't turn up, or because the friendship I had imagined was an error of my dreams. I've always lived alone, and ever more alone as I've become more self- aware.

#KnowledgeofHell #AntónioLoboAntunes ...because he had always found in women…in their mute gaze…acidity of their skin,something he did not find by himself and that constituted a kind of indecipherable complement of himself,the fraction of light,of clarity of fruit,of the jubilant taste of orange…

#Transcription #BenLerner My seat was facing opposite the direction of travel…I took a photo of the wintry, postindustrial landscape through my masked reflection as the train picked up speed, and then I checked and deleted the photo and shut my eyes and faced the past.

#SwannsWay #MarcelProust And long afterwards, when the rearrangement…of her cattleyas had quite fallen into desuetude, the metaphor "Do a cattleya," transmuted into a simple verb which they would employ without thinking when they wished to refer to the act of physical possession….

#V #GravitysRainbow #Mason&Dixon #AgainsttheDay #ThomasPynchon