Books may well be the only true magic.
― Alice Hoffman

 

Below is the original photo used to create this image. This dramatic sky was captured on my way home from work in downtown Richmond, VA. No special lighting or retouching, just a snap from my smart phone.

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.
― William Styron, Conversations with William Styron

 

Below is the original photo used to create this image. I visited a local-ish winery, Saude Creek, located in Lanexa, VA. Their late-summer landscaping was in full bloom and I probably took way too many photos of the lush foliage and flowers including these Black-eyed-Susans. Oh, and the wine was good too… No special lighting or retouching, just a snap from my smart phone.

  

Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury and remedying it.
― JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

 

Below is the original photo used to create this image. I found this lovely white bloom outside of a restaurant in Bon Air, VA.  No special lighting or retouching, just a snap from my smart phone.

 

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Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

 

 

Below is the original photo used to create this image. It turns out my front yard is the perfect breeding ground for mushrooms… No special lighting or retouching, just a snap from my smart phone.

Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.
― Jane Yolen, Touch Magic: Fantasy, Faerie & Folklore in the Literature of Childhood

 

 

Getting into the Halloween spirit with some creepy and sometimes disturbing kaleidoscopes…
Below is the original photo used to create this image. This is a royalty-free image from Pixabay.

No book can be appreciated until it has been slept with and dreamed over.
― Eugene Field

 

Below is the original photo used to create this image. I found this vibrant bush outside of a restaurant in Bon Air, VA.  No special lighting or retouching, just a snap from my smart phone.

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It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.
― Oscar Wilde

 

Below is the original photo used to create this image. I stumbled across these bizarre flowers while taking a walk around my hotel on a July trip to Shawsville, VA to visit family. No special lighting or retouching, just a snap from my smart phone.

Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind 

 

 

Below is the original photo used to create this image. I visited a local-ish winery, Saude Creek, located in Lanexa, VA. Their late-summer landscaping was in full bloom and I probably took way too many photos of the lush foliage and flowers including these Black-eyed-Susans. Oh, and the wine was good too… No special lighting or retouching, just a snap from my smart phone.

  

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

 

Below is the original photo used to create this image. This dramatic sky was captured on my way home from work in downtown Richmond, VA. No special lighting or retouching, just a snap from my smart phone.

I believe in the magic of books. I believe that during certain periods in our lives we are drawn to particular books–whether it’s strolling down the aisles of a bookshop with no idea whatsoever of what it is that we want to read and suddenly finding the most perfect, most wonderfully suitable book staring us right in the face. Unblinking. Or a chance meeting with a stranger or friend who recommends a book we would never ordinarily reach for. Books have the ability to find their own way into our lives.
― Cecelia Ahern

 

 

Below is the original photo used to create this image. It turns out my front yard is the perfect breeding ground for mushrooms… No special lighting or retouching, just a snap from my smart phone.