"She ate and ate till she blew up like a Macy's Thanksgiving Day balloon, her face like a watermelon, because she needed love."
—Anne Richardson Roiphe, 1185 Park Avenue

Grandson of a millionaire, [Cole] Porter spent his entire life surrounded by opulence, and his home at 13 re Monsieur was no exception. In the entryway, black- and- white checked tile led from the front door to a finely cut marble staircase flanked on each side by columns. From the top of the stairs, a grand salon stretched out over much of the first floor, enclosing in its white paneling soft velvet couches, oriental- finished tables, and colorful rugs. Platinum paper coated the library walls, while elsewhere in the house zebra- skin rugs complemented ornate art deco furnishing. . . . Porter’s workroom . . . , painted entirely in white, contained nothing but a white table, a white piano, and one hundred white pencils. The wall facing the courtyard was made of frosted glass with a small, clear porthole so that Porter could gaze outside for inspiration.
—Luke Miner, Paris Jazz: A Guide, 2005.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

Piecing together the secret of the shadow . . .


 

Chris writes:

The irony was that neither partygoer ever snagged the other's number.

The springtime trees of Chitra were perfect as a scene imagined from a storybook. They grew short and tall, thin and spreading, leafy and open. Their leaves were grass- green, blue- green, yellow- green, dark green, light green, crimson and brown and yellow, glossy and dull, smooth and sticky, round and pointed like fingers, fluttering and still. The barks of the trees were rough and smooth and furry, grey and white and green and black, cool and warm. The flowers grew in bunches or grew apart; they were red, yellow, white, pink and honey- colored; they were green and blue and purple and orange and silver and gold and lavender; they were large and small. All among the trees were tapering vines and slender creepers, rushes and canes and reeds, ferns and shrubs and grasses and orchids and bamboo and moss.
—William Buck, Ramayana, 2000.

According to Plato, a particular bicycle with two wheels missing is distinct from the abstract form of Bicycle-ness.  A Bicycle is the ideal that allows us to identify the distorted reflections of bicycles all around us.

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Sara Luz wrote:

"In the end, we may be in love with books, but it’s words that have truly won our hearts. It’s words that whisper into our ear and transform us, that make us believe in other worlds or new emotions we didn’t know existed; it’s words that keep us company in . . . planes, on subway trains, or our comfy couches. It is words, not books, paper, papyrus of vellum pages that transform our lives."

—Jeff Gomez, Print is Dead; Books in Our Digital Age, 2008