“If I choose abstraction over reality, it is because I consider it the lesser chaos.” -Robert Brault

“Standing there, gaping at this monstrous and inhumane spectacle of rock and cloud and sky and space, I feel a ridiculous greed and possessiveness come over me. I want to know it all, posess it all, embrace the entire scene intimately, deeply, totally...” —Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

"A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines." -Frank Lloyd Wright

“This is a brief life, but in its brevity it offers us some splendid moments, some meaningful adventures.”
― Rudyard Kipling, Kim

Art is never finished, only abandoned
― Leonardo da Vinci

"There is a wide, yawning black infinity. In every direction, the extension is endless; the sensation of depth is overwhelming. And the darkness is immortal. Where light exists, it is pure, blazing, fierce; but light exists almost nowhere, and the blackness itself is also pure and blazing and fierce."

—Carl Sagan

“You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.”  

—Max Ehrmann, Desiderata

George Floyd- protest and police response in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.”
― William Faulkner

“All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful, but the beauty is grim.” -Christopher Morley

Thy sea, O God, so great,
My boat so small.
It cannot be that any happy fate
Will me befall
Save as Thy goodness opens paths for me
Through the consuming vastness of the sea.

Thy winds, O God, so strong,
So slight my sail.
How could I curb and bit them on the long
And saltry trail,
Unless Thy love were mightier than the wrath
Of all the tempests that beset my path?

Thy world, O God, so fierce,
And I so frail.
Yet, though its arrows threaten oft to pierce
My fragile mail,
Cities of refuge rise where dangers cease,
Sweet silences abound, and all is peace.

~Winfred Ernest Garrison

“Havana still looks like you want it to look. Or maybe just how I want it to look. What was once one of the wealthiest cities in Latin America, left to the elements, left to collapse, was frozen gloriously in time. In fits and starts Cuba is changing, but it’s not sugar or rum or tobacco or casino gambling that is the new god. It’s tourism.” -Anthony Bourdain

“Performance art is about joy, about making something that's so full of kind of a wild joy that you really can't put into words.” -Laurie Anderson

"How can rocks and sand and silence make us afraid and yet be so wonderful?" —Edna Brush Perkins

“All the world’s a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.” – Seán O’Casey

“It seems a fine line between being a matador and being a rodeo clown” -Jase Robertson

“The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules. It's people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages.” -Banksy, Wall and Piece

“As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment.”
― John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

Hovenweep National Monument protects six prehistoric, Puebloan-era villages spread over a twenty-mile expanse of mesa tops and canyons along the Utah-Colorado border. Multi-storied towers perched on canyon rims and balanced on boulders.... Human habitation at Hovenweep dates to over 10,000 years ago when nomadic Paleoindians visited the Cajon Mesa to gather food and hunt game. These people used the area for centuries, following the seasonal weather patterns. By about A.D. 900, people started to settle at Hovenweep year-round, planting and harvesting crops in the rich soil of the mesa top. ― NationalParks.org

“I never know in advance what I will photograph, … I go out into the world and hope I will come across something that imperatively interests me. I am addicted to the found object. I have no doubt that I will continue to make photographs till my last breath.” -Ansel Adams

“The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.” - Jacques Yves Cousteau

“I am humbled. It’s hard to focus the camera when you’re crying.”

— R. Rogers

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” – Aldous Huxley

“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” -William Shakespeare

"Back in the early days of my political career, I was called Socialist Cindy. I just hate the nickname Cindy." - Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister

“Of all the letters I’ve received from readers, my favorite came from a homeless man. It arrived in a dirty envelope with no return address, and it was scrawled on neon orange paper. It was signed “Berkeley Baby.” It would never have made it past the New York Times mailroom after the anthrax scare. The letter writer turned out to have been the night rewrite editor on the metro desk at the New York Times before he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in the mid-1970s. Since then, he had adopted the name Berkeley Baby and lived on the streets of Berkeley, California, near the university, a forlorn, sad figure not unlike the Phantom of Fine Hall. He wrote, “John Nash’s story gives me hope that one day the world will come back to me too.”
― Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind

“Every man’s work, whether it be literature, or music, or pictures, or architecture, or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.”

— Samuel Butler

“Seattle is not an overly friendly city. It is a civil city, but not altogether friendly. People from outside mistake the civility for friendliness. Seattle is full of people who have their own lives to live. They won't waste their time being friendly. But they are civil.”

-Jonathan Raban

“In Seattle you haven't had enough coffee until you can thread a sewing machine while it's running.”

-Jeff Bezos

“We want you, as a thoughtful ally, to celebrate with us. But we also need you to accept that this celebration was not intended for you. This is a moment for the LGBTQ community, and by entering this space, it's important to accept that your good time is secondary.

"To be visible, to celebrate our uniqueness, to celebrate our queerness — that is what Pride means to this community," Roybal says. "I want room to be my uniquely fabulous queer self."

As a community, we all want to be our uniquely fabulous queer selves at Pride. And we need those who can't relate to that experience to lift us up in our celebration.

After all, that's the main role of a straight ally at Pride and beyond — to lift up a community in celebration and solidarity, while helping clear space for us to be ourselves.” - Katie Dupere, Mashable

The Shenandoa is a 65-foot purse seiner, built in 1925, and donated to the Harbor History Museum in Gig Harbor, WA in 2000. The fishing vessel is currently being restored.

"Where are the fish, though?" "In the sea they say, in the boats we pray," said Dan, quoting a fisherman's proverb."

-- Rudyard Kipling, Captains Courageous

“The system was never broken. It was built this way." -Unknown

“The most important thing you learn as a sports photographer is anticipation - not where the action is taking place, but where it's going to take place. Not where the subject is now, but where they're going to be.” -Lawrence Schiller

“I love the people I photograph. I mean, they’re my friends. I’ve never met most of them or I don’t know them at all, yet through my images I live with them.” -Bruce Gilden

“If your photos aren’t good enough, then you’re not close enough.” -Robert Capa

A friend of mine met Dorothea Lange when she was making her iconic images of the Great Depression. Many years later he still complained that her photographs of his little town of Escalante only captured the poor and destitute. "She never took photos of the nice houses.”

My series "Seattle in Time of Pandemic" does not include images of "nice houses.” The photos look bleak because the time feels bleak. Color is gone or muted because the world feels like it is dark and has lost vibrancy. This too shall pass, but for now, we live in a time of pandemic.

- Ron Rogers

"This is the way so many great meals in my life have been enjoyed: sitting in the street, eating something out of a bowl that I'm not exactly sure what it is, scooters going by. It's so delicious, I feel like an animal." ― Anthony Bourdain

“For years now there had been no country here but the war.”
― Michael Herr, Dispatches

“Saigon, shit, I'm still only in Saigon. Every time I think I'm gonna wake up back in the jungle.” ― Apocalypse Now

A community of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.
– John F. Kennedy

You want a friend in Washington? Get a dog.
– Harry S Truman