People in these pictures are unknown to me as they are perhaps to themselves ... and are not posing ... at least for me.

“Daffodils,

that come before the swallow dares, and takes

the winds of March with beauty.”

Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale

“I think nothing human alien to me”

Terence

"Any man, even the greatest, can be broken in a moment and has no refuge. Any theory that denies this is a lie"

"The Black Prince", Iris Murdoch.

"We're all different but the difference is the same"

A.D.

“The beginning of genius is being scared shitless.”

― Louis-Ferdinand Céline

“One little second of pleasure, a whole life of pain...my mother knew nothing of the pleasures of a good roll in the hay...she missed out on all that...like me, her son...a lifetime of sacrifice!...the woman who can grunt and rave in the throes of a deep fuck can die happy...”

― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Fable for Another Time

“Questions of identity”, has popped up and been proposed as a subject by many photographers. Thought brought this …

“There are two identities, dead or alive. If the latter … everything that happens is inevitable”.

A.D.

" We defy augury.

There is special providence in

the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to

come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come—the

readiness is all."

Shakespeare, Hamlet

"Reality is all. All."

D.A.

“so many vaginas, stomachs, cocks, snouts, and flies you don't know what to do with them ... shovelsfull! ... but hearts? ... very rare! in the last five hundred million years too many cocks and gastric tubes to count ... but hearts? ... on your fingers! ...”

― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, North

“In the end he died of a heart attack, under circumstances that were anything but cosy … an attack of angina pectoris that lasted twenty minutes. He held out for a hundred and twenty seconds with his classical memories, his resolutions, the example of Caesar … but for eighteen minutes he screamed like a stuck pig.”

Louis-Ferdinand Celine “Death on Credit”

Perhaps more than anything the mediation's of coincidence and chance are worth contemplating.

AD

"Life is, shall we say, the continuous cleaning of teeth".

Nosferatu

"Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling"

Iris Murdoch

“I warn you that when the princes of this world start loving you it means they are going to grind you up into battle sausage.”

― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

"Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise."

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown."

Iris Murdoch

"I had a lot of dates but I decided to stay home and dye my eyebrows."

Andy Warhol

"He had begun to glimpse the distance which separates the nice from the good, and the vision of this gap had terrified his soul. He had seen, far off, what is perhaps the most dreadful thing in the world, the other face of love, its blank face."

Iris Murdoch

"Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed."

Herman Melville

"'the Highest cannot be spoken of in words'"

Goethe

"Anything can happen in life, especially nothing."

— Michel Houellebecq"

"Nothing cannot exist

Except by not existing

So it is with God"

AD

"Like horses

Men dream

In blinkers

Removed in sleep

Awake then

Perceive

The night mare"

AD

"Everything that lives is holy".

William Blake

"Eternity is a waste of time"

AD

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

William Wordsworth (Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood)

"Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”

Bashô

"That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain."

(Shakespeare, Hamlet)

"God is the poetic genius in each of us".

William Blake

“People often say that the English are very cold fish, very reserved, that they have a way of looking at things – even tragedy – with a sense of irony. There’s some truth in it; it’s pretty stupid of them, though. Humor won’t save you; it doesn’t really do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn’t matter how brave you are, how reserved, or how much you’ve developed a sense of humor, you still end up with your heart broken. That’s when you stop laughing. In the end there’s just the cold, the silence and the loneliness. In the end, there’s only death.”

― Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles

“This patience is akin to the real doctra ignorantia of which philosophers remotely speak and which mystics East and West strive to attain. If we experience that an infinite ocean of nameless mystery spreads out beyond the pitifully small island of our knowledge, and if we interpret this experience in the light of what we have previously been speaking about, perhaps the unity of this experience can bring us closer to the enormous courage of the saints and mystics who submerged their soul in its source, and awaken this courage in us too… For they experience this ocean of holy mystery bounding the “tiny island of their knowledge” no longer as a boundary that confines them; they dare to set out on this ocean; they are not afraid that its silent immensity will swallow them up; they entrust themselves to this unknown that is known, seeing in it the blessed mystery that shelters them.”

Karl Rahner

"For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche"

Herman Hesse