Ian D

“Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter,
Sermons and soda-water the day after.”
― Lord Byron, Don Juan

“Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was very heaven.”
― William Wordsworth, The Prelude

“Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie.”
― Hokusai