Ruins may be decaying, they are not dead, they are filled with possibilities for wondrous adventure, inspiring visions, quiet moments, peripatetic playfulness, dystopic preparation and artistic potential. -- Bradley Garrett, Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City...

From where I stood I watched them recede in the frame of the roadway, between the Moorish house and the Lombardy poplar. Then the little sedan boldly swung past the front truck and, free at last, spurted up the shining road, which one could make out narrowing to a...

Lazy Eye: What's your real job, sir?Scout Master Ward: I'm a math teacher.Lazy Eye: What grade?Scout Master Ward: Eighth... I'm going to change my answer, in fact. This is my real job: Scout Master, Troop 55. I'm a math teacher on the side.   -- Wes Anderson's...

You only gotta do one thing well to make it in this world, babe / You got a woman waiting for you there / All you ever gotta do is be a good man one time to one woman / And that'll be the end of the road, babe -- 'Cry Baby' by Bert Berns and Jerry Ragovoy (as...

People deal too much with the negative, with what is wrong. Why not try and see positive things, to just touch those things and make them bloom? -- Thich Nhat Hanh My wife talks to our peppers and tomatoes. Oooh you're so cute! You'll be a big plant someday! You're...

The most amusing thing about a pantomime horse is the necessity of having to shoot it twice. -- Steve Aylett, Bigot Hall Consider the pantomime horse: two people who share a single quadruped costume, enclosed within a relationship of dark and airless intimacy. The...

When I went off to school, I initially majored in architecture. Unlike George Costanza, I had never dreamed of pretending to be an architect and -- looking back -- I have no idea why I chose that major. I was a terrible architect. A classmate, who later became a very...

Some lucky people remember only the good times and refuse to dwell on their tragedies. My family is not among that group. Wherever two or more of my ancient ancestors gather together, the air becomes fetid with tales of the suffering experienced by the long-expired....

My college writing instructor -- a magnificent old Welshman who claimed to have known W.C. Fields and to have survived a fistfight with Robert Shaw -- advised against writing outdoors. It seems like a good idea, he said. But then the bugs bite and the sun is in your...