Pine Ridge Falls, Unicoi County, TN
“One of the keys to happiness
is a bad memory.”
Rita Mae Brown
Category Archives: Clark’s Creek
Just Listen
Sill Branch Falls
“Listening, not imitation,
may be the sincerest form of flattery.”
Dr. Joyce Brothers, b. 1927
Trust
Sill Branch Falls, Unicoi County
“When you really trust someone,
you have to be okay with not understanding some things.”
Real and Costly Love
Pine Ridge Falls, Unicoi County
“It is a serious thing to live in a society of
possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest
and most uninteresting person you can talk to
may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now,
you would be strongly tempted to worship,
or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet,
if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree,
helping each other to one or other of these destinations.
It is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them,
that we should conduct all our dealings with one another,
all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.
Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations — these are mortal,
and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals
whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit –
immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.
This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn.
We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind
(and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists
between people who have, from the outset,
taken each other seriously –
no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.
And our charity must be a real and costly love,
with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner –
no mere tolerance, or indulgence
which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.”
C. S. Lewis, 1898-1963
My Refuge
Sill Branch Falls
“Crying is the refuge of plain women,
but the ruin of pretty ones.”
Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900
Irish playwright, novelist, poet
Tough Times
Sill Branch Falls, Unicoi County
“Every time you meet a situation, though you think at the time
it is an impossibility and you go through the torture of the damned,
once you have met it and lived through it,
you find that forever after you are freer than you were before.”
Eleanor Roosevelt, 1884-1962
American political leader, Civil Rights advocate,
and First Lady from 1933-1945
Here and There
Sill Branch Falls, Unicoi County
“Here and there a tawny brook prattled out from among the underwood
and lost itself again in the ferns and brambles upon the further side.
Save the dull piping of insects and the sough of the leaves,
there was silence everywhere—the sweet restful silence of nature.”
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1859-1930
“The White Company”
Laugh and Weep
Pine Ridge Falls, Clark’s Creek, Unicoi Co., TN
“Laugh till you weep. Weep till there’s nothing left
but to laugh at your weeping. In the end it’s all one.”
Frederick Buechner, 1926-
Presbyterian minister and American author
The Dimpling Stream
Pine Ridge Falls, Clark’s Creek, Unicoi Co., TN
“When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy,
And the dimpling stream runs laughing by;
When the air does laugh with our merry wit,
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it.”
Lord Byron, 1788-1824
Anglo-Scottish poet
