Common Sense ~ Integrity ~ Good Taste

In The Private World of KATHARINE HEPBURN, the actress stated, "I have written about things everyone experiences: success, failure, sickness, moving out of a house you love, and smashing up a car. But I'm not going to write anything about my deep personal life. I don't understand why people care about things like that."

Hepburn sailed, swam, golfed, played tennis, bicycled, walked, worked out with a private trainer ~ did her own gardening (refused to hire a gardener) and stood on her head each day for four minutes.

The New York Times described Hepburn's "characteristic feisty reverence for common sense, integrity and good taste."
Books:
At age 77, in 1987, Hepburn wrote her first memoir titled, The Making of 'The African Queen' or How I Went To Africa With Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind.

The Private World of Katharine Hepburn written and photographed by John Bryson, Foreward by KH, Little, Brown and Company, 1990.

ME, Stories of My Life, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1991.

Quoting a worthwhile author, poet or sharing a photograph is one of our bookshop pleasures.

Last night we attended a live stage production ~ which we do sometimes ~ and came home feeling drained. We witnessed spousal fighting, shouting, swearing, menial conversations in mundane domestic settings ~ all on stage. It was depressing.

One cannot help but feel that we could have been at home beside the fire reading a good book. Ah , yes, and the wind and snow was blowing. The roads were slippery; parking was a challenge and the lineup long.

Oh, the pleasures of a good book.
~ lw

Christina Rossetti"s Who Has Seen The Wind

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.

~Christina Rossetti (1830 - 1894) British Poet
Caroline Kennedy included Who Has Seen the Wind
in her 2005 book, A Family of Poems/ My Favorite Poetry For Children. Hyperion.

Ronald Reagan

Thought for Today:

"Surround yourself with the best people you can find, delegate authority, and don't interfere."

~ Ronald Reagan (February 6, 1911 - June 5, 2004) 40th President of the United States, 1981 - 1989.

Stone Boy With Book Buried in Snow ~ Canadian Winter Today Without Sunshine.

Short List for the Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction is:

On the Farm/ Stevie Cameron
Mordecai: The Life & Times/ Charles Foran
Defiant Spirits/ Ross King
The Geography of Arrival/ George Sipos
The Love Queen of Malabar/ Merrily Weisbord

Winner to be announced on Monday, February 14.

http://www.thecharlestaylorprize.ca/

"If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them ~ peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye; set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances."

~ Winston Churchill, (1874 - 1965) British Statesman, served as Prime Minister