Tile No. 1

Claudia Castro Luna (1967- ) served as Seattle’s first Civic Poet from 2015-2017, during which time she founded and curated the Seattle Poetic Grid, an interactive poetic map of the city. In 2018 she was named Washington State’s Poet Laureate, where she expanded her literary mapping work to the Washington Poetic Routes. In 2019, Luna was named a fellow of the American Academy of Poets. Born in El Salvador, Luna emigrated to the United States in 1981 at the height of that country’s civil war, and her work often reflects on immigration and displacement, as well as exploring the intersection of place and poetry. This poem, presented in its entirety, is entitled “A Corner to Love,” and first appeared as part of the Seattle Poetic Grid.

Tile No. 2

Timothy Egan (1954- ) is a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, columnist and author of numerous popular history books, including The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, winner of the National Book Award, and Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis, which received a Carnegie Medal for best non-fiction. Egan’s writing has often focused on the American West, and this passage is taken from his first book, The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest, a meditation on our distinctive corner of the country in which the author follows in the footsteps of early explorer Theodore Winthrop. Here he reflects on Seattle’s restless history as he approaches the city by kayak. 

Tile No. 3

Arthur O. Dillon (1873 - 1958) was born in Minnesota, moving to Washington in the 1890’s where he worked as a U.S. Marshall, schoolteacher and probate attorney. In May 1909, as Seattle’s bright future was promoted during the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition, Dillon petitioned the City Council to adopt his “Seattle the Peerless City” as our official song. After councilmember Frederick Sawyer sang it for them, the bouncy march song which hailed Seattle as the “Metropolis of the West” and “Gateway to the Orient” was officialized on the spot. In 1911, Dillon moved to California where he became a judge, and contributed poems to area newspapers. He never married.

Tile No. 4

Colleen J. McElroy (1935- ) was born in St. Louis and moved to the Puget Sound area in the late 1960s to pursue a career in speech pathology. She began to write poems while pursuing her Ph.D. in Ethnolinguistic Patterns of Dialect Differences and Oral Traditions at the University of Washington, where she would later head up the Creative Writing program as the first African American woman to become full professor at U.W. An internationally respected and influential poet, memoirist and teacher, she served as editor for The Seattle Review from 1995 – 2006. These verses are quoted from McElroy’s poem “The Lover Romanced by Rain,” which first appeared in McElroy’s 1981 collection Lie and Say You Love Me: Poems, and also appears in What Madness Brought Me Here: New and Selected Poems, 1968 -1988.

Tile No. 6

Isadora Duncan (1877 – 1927) was an American dancer whose expressive, naturalistic aesthetic broke the rigid confines of classical ballet, helping to establish interpretive dance as an art form and setting the stage for modern dance. Duncan’s free spirited, iconoclastic approach to art, life and love earned her worldwide fame and notoriety. The lines quoted here were reportedly exclaimed by Duncan (who had recently emigrated to Soviet Russia), to a scandalized Boston audience in 1922. At the end of a performance, she tore a red scarf from her costume, waved it aloft and cried out “This is red! So am I! It is the color of life and vigor! You were once wild here! Don’t let them tame you!” Boston’s mayor banned her from performing there ever again, and she responded by declaring that her art was symbolic of the freedom of women, and their emancipation from the hidebound conventions of New England Puritanism. 

Tile No. 8

Legendary record producer, composer, arranger and conductor Quincy Jones (1933- ) moved to the Seattle area during the Second World War when his father got work at the Bremerton shipyards. He would later attend Garfield High School, learning music in an afterschool band and playing with the young Ray Charles in nightclubs along Seattle’s Jackson Street. In a storied career he has conducted big bands, scored dozens of films, and produced hit albums for the likes of Michael Jackson, Sarah Vaughan and Frank Sinatra. Throughout his career, Jones has also been an exemplary philanthropist, championing numerous humanitarian causes around the world. A musical mentor to generations, his lifelong interest in supporting young artists is well expressed in this quotation. 

Tile No. 9

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 – 322 BCE) is by any measure one of the most influential minds in human history. Aristotle’s wide-ranging explorations into logic, ethics, politics, rhetoric, physics and the natural world dominated scholarship across Europe until the Enlightenment. He departed from the idealism of his teacher Plato to focus on the natural order. The lines quoted here are from the Nichomachean Ethics, in a section discussing the nature of happiness in which Aristotle suggests the natural or fitting path to happiness lies not through mere chance or luck, but must be earned through effort on our parts. Aristotle maintained that the path to Eudemonia, a state of flourishing, lays through virtue, which meant striking a balance between opposing excesses or vices. To achieve this “golden mean” was to be in accord with nature, and thus, happy. For all his influence, Aristotle seems to have failed to pass this lesson on to his most famous pupil, Alexander the Great. 

Tile No. 11

Singer, songwriter and music producer Neko Case (1970- ) was born in Virginia and has lived all over but has called Tacoma her hometown. Case has sung with a number of groups, most notably the Vancouver BC Indie Rock group New Pornographers. With vocals characterized by a penetrating, wistful contralto, lush twangy guitars and oblique, often brooding lyrics, her solo work defies easy categorization but has often been termed “country noir.” This quote is from the lyric of “The Curse of the I-5 Corridor,” a haunting duet with grunge legend Mark Lanegan from Case’s 2018 album, Hell-On. 

Tile No. 12

Italian author and journalist Italo Calvino (1929 – 1985) enjoyed international renown for such inventive fabulist titles as Cosmicomics, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Calvino’s non-linear narratives toy with causality, inviting questions about life, fate and chance. The quotation is taken from Calvino’s 1972 novel Invisible Cities, a surreal travelogue comprised of brief passages in which the explorer Marco Polo describes to the aged Kublai Khan a succession of fifty-five fictitious cities, each a seeming parable about some aspect of existence. When the great Khan raises overly literal questions about these cities, the explorer tells him that cities are like dreams, riddles made up of desires and fears, or questions we are forced to answer, like the riddle of the Sphinx. 

Tile No. 13

Colleen J. McElroy (1935- ) was born in St. Louis and moved to the Puget Sound area in the late 1960s to pursue a career in speech pathology. She began to write poems while pursuing her Ph.D. in Ethnolinguistic Patterns of Dialect Differences and Oral Traditions at the University of Washington, where she would later head up the Creative Writing program as the first African American woman to become full professor at U.W. An internationally respected and influential poet, memoirist and teacher, she served as editor for The Seattle Review from 1995 – 2006. These lines are quoted from “Remarks Beneath the Visiting Moon,” a poem about being hopelessly in love at the age of 60, published in McElroy’s 2008 collection Sleeping with the Moon. 

Tile No. 14

Octavia E. Butler (1947 – 2006) was a groundbreaking science fiction author whose works often centered marginalized voices, helping to inspire many writers and the flourishing Afrofuturist literary movement. Born and raised in Pasadena, California, Butler began reading and writing speculative fiction at an early age. She published extensively in the 1970s and ‘80s, winning Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards, among others, and was the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. In 1993 she published the dystopian novel Parable of the Sower, and the lines quoted are taken from Butler’s sequel to that book, Parable of the Talents. Set in the year 2024, the members of a utopian community struggle against an oppressive Christian Fundamentalist regime intent on “Making American Great Again,” in part by reviving slavery. Having moved to Seattle in 1999, Butler had planned a third book, Parable of the Trickster, in which humans sought a new home in space, but was unable to write the book before her untimely death in 2006. 

Tile No. 15

Arundhati Roy (1961- ) is an Indian novelist and political activist. Roy’s Booker Prize-winning first novel The God of Small Things, a sweeping multi-generational novel tracing the decline of a once respected family in Kerala, was an international sensation. After writing several works of non-fiction on human rights, democracy, and the societal and environmental costs of capitalism, Roy returned to fiction in 2017 with a sweeping epic of modern India, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, from which these lines are taken, from a passage in which the artist Tilo contemplates the city at night. Roy’s fiction is characterized by moving human dramas set against a backdrop of larger societal and political movements, depicted with trenchant wit and an uncompromising moral force, inspiring comparison with the novels of Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and Salman Rushdie. 

Tile No. 16

“Allowing ourselves to become pure point of view, we hang in midair over the city. What we see now is a gigantic metropolis waking up.”

Haruki Murakami (1949- ) is an internationally renowned Japanese writer whose works have been translated into over fifty languages. In such novels as A Wild Sheep Chase, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Kafka on the Shore, Murakami juxtaposes the familiar – often including elements of American popular culture and music – with strange and ineffable imagery, drawing the reader into disarming, dreamlike realities. The introspection of his earlier novels has turned toward more socially engaged writing, yet still approaching serious topics in unexpected ways. His novel After Dark, from which these lines are taken, takes place over a single night in Tokyo, following a pair of sisters as one stays up in a Denny’s restaurant, and the other sleeps in a love hotel, traveling in her subconscious into a strange netherworld. In this passage at the novel’s end, a new day dawns, and we observe the city waking up. 

Tile No. 17

Anastacia-Reneé Tolbert (1972- ) is a queer multi-genre writer, performer, educator, and interdisciplinary artist. She served as the Seattle Civic Poet from 2017-2019 and the 2015-2017 Poet-in-Residence at Hugo House, and is the recipient of the 2018 James W. Ray Distinguished Artist Award. Anastacia-Reneé grew up in Kansas City and travelled extensively, settling in Seattle in 2007. Writing in a variety of styles and forms, her works explore race, gender, sexuality, identity, community, and much more. The lines quoted here are from her piece The City, a part of her multiform fictionalized autobiographical collection Forget It.

Tile No. 18

Sylvia Plath (1932 – 1963) was an American poet and fiction writer acclaimed for her revealing confessional verse. Plath wrote poetry from an early age, winning a Fulbright scholarship to attend Cambridge University. While in England she married poet Ted Hughes, and in 1962, the pair separated owing to Hughes’s infidelity. In 1963 Plath published her only novel, The Bell Jar, in which she depicted her experiences with depression and the oppressive confines of women’s roles in mid-century America. The passage quoted here describes relief felt by Plath’s alter ego Esther Greenwood when the clouds finally lift. Weeks after the publication of what would become a classic, Plath committed suicide. In 1982, Plath was awarded the first ever posthumous Pulitzer Prize for her Collected Poems.

Tile No. 19

Sophocles (496 – 406 BCE) was one of the most prolific tragic playwrights of ancient Athens, having written over 120 plays and competed in 30 dramatic festivals, 24 of which he won. He was credited with adding a third actor to the stage, allowing for scenes of greater psychological depth than previously. Only seven of his plays have come down to us: Ajax, Antigone, Oedipus Rex, Electra, Philoctetes, Oedipus at Colonus, and the source of this quotation, The Women of Trachis. In the scene quoted, Deianeira contemplates trying out a love charm on her husband Heracles, whose eye she fears has wandered. Her lady’s counsel to learn by doing turns out to be a piece of bad advice, as the untried charm winds up being lethal poison, sending Heracles to his doom. 

Tile No. 20

Eddie Vedder (1964- ) is an American singer, songwriter and musician best known as the lead vocalist and lyricist for the Seattle-based alternative rock band Pearl Jam. Born in Evanston, Illinois, Vedder spent much of his youth in San Diego, where he developed his love of music and of surfing, both of which are evident in the song “Oceans” from Pearl Jam’s multi-platinum debut album 10, the source of this quotation. In an interview, Vedder said he wrote the lyric while accidentally locked out of the recording studio in the rain, listening to the bass coming through the wall. “Oceans” is one of many of Vedder’s lyrics that employ water imagery.

Tile No. 21

“Give me fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.”

Vilfredo Pareto (1848 - 1923) was an influential Italian economist and polymath who is best known today for the Pareto distribution, which observed that 80% of Italy’s wealth was concentrated in the hands of 20% of its people, and was subsequently applied to a broad range of cases as the Pareto principle, or the 80/20 rule. Pareto was a proponent of a cross-disciplinary approach to economics that looked to sociology for a less abstract, more empirically nuanced approach to understanding. In the passage quoted here, he refers to the errors of the Renaissance astronomer Johannes Kepler, whose imperfect theories helped point the way to Isaac Newton’s theory of universal gravitation.  

Tile No. 22

Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955) was a German theoretical physicist whose theory of relativity and other discoveries revolutionized our understanding of the universe and paved the way for quantum physics. Although his discoveries may have helped give rise to the atomic bomb, he was a lifelong pacifist. In addition to his unrivalled scientific genius which garnered him a Nobel Prize in 1921, Einstein had a lifelong love of music and philosophy. In this quotation from On Science, Einstein discusses his respect for intuition and inspiration, calling it “a real factor in scientific research.” 

Tile No. 23

Robert Frost (1874 – 1963) was an American poet known for conveying profound ideas and experiences in a deceptively colloquial style. Born in San Francisco, he lived most of his life in New Hampshire, and the natural environs and austere attitudes of New England would forever be associated with his poetry. Frost was awarded his first Pulitzer Prize in 1924 for New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes, and would receive three more Pulitzers across a literary career spanning half a century. Although much of his poetry treats on darker and more tragic aspects of life, he also had a reputation as a folksy raconteur, as evidenced by this humorous quotation. 

Tile No. 24

Lily Baumgart (2000- ) served as Seattle’s Youth Poet Laureate for 2017/18, and was a participant in the first Jack Straw Young Writers Program in 2015/16. Baumgart’s first volume of poetry, Admitted to the Personal Ads, was published in 2018. The lines quoted here are from Baumgart’s poem “Volunteer Park,” which was featured as part of the Seattle Poetic Grid created by Seattle Civic Poet Claudia Casto-Luna. 

Tile No. 25

Macklemore (1983- ) is a Seattle rapper and songwriter. Born Benjamin Haggerty, he grew up in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, attending Garfield and Nathan Hale High Schools, where he began writing music and performing and adopted the stage name Professor Macklemore. The lyrics quoted here are from “The Town,” a tribute to Seattle’s homegrown hip-hop scene included on his 2009 release The Unplanned Mixtape. A few years later collaborating with producer Ryan Lewis, Macklemore would dominate the International music charts with hit singles “Thrift Shop,” “Can’t Hold Us,” and “Same Love,” the latter advocating for gay and lesbian rights while taking to task hip-hop’s homophobic tendencies.  

Tile No. 26

Pauline Hillaire, Scälla–Of the Killer Whale (1929 - 2016) was an artist, teacher, cultural historian, author, and conservator of Lummi Nation knowledge, arts and culture. Hillaire’s grandfather Frank (Haeteluk) was the last chief of the Lummi, and her father Joe was a master carver of totem poles and orator whose life and legacy are the subject of Hillaire’s 2013 book A Totem Pole History. Hillaire carried on the work of her father and grandfather to preserve and share this traditional art form with the Setting Sun Dancers, and worked with students young and old for many years to bring Salish heritage and values to new generations, for which she was recognized as a 2013 NEA National Heritage Fellow. The lines quoted here are from one such educational outreach program, Sharing the Circle, in which Hillaire challenges her listeners to ground their lives and art by means of these four fundamental questions.  

Tile No. 27

Patricia Lockwood (1982- ) is an American poet and author prized for her wit and candor. Her debut collection Balloon Pop Outlaw Black was the bestselling small press poetry book of 2013, fueled in part by her artfully ironic risqué tweets. Her poem “Rape Joke” became a viral internet sensation, and is included in her second collection Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals. The lines quoted here are from her 2017 memoir Priestdaddy, in which she recounts moving back home to the rectory of her father, a married Catholic priest. The memoir received widespread acclaim and was awarded the 2018 James Thurber Prize for American Humor. In this passage she compares the staid traditionalism of her father’s Roman Catholicism with her own devotion to poetry’s paradoxically time-honored traditions of iconoclastic word play. 

Tile No. 28

Denise Levertov (1923 – 1997) was a poet and teacher who published twenty-four volumes of poetry over a prolific career spanning fifty years. Born and raised in England, where her Russian émigré father had converted from Judaism to become an Anglican Priest, Levertov moved to America in 1947. Active during the anti-war movement of the 1960’s, her prolific poetic output ranged from political protest to metaphysical meditation. In 1989 she settled near Seattle’s Seward Park where the presence of Mount Rainier and Lake Washington infused much of her later spiritual poetry, characterized by spare images drawn from nature. This quotation is from her poem “Ancient Stairway,” published in This Great Unknowing: Last Poems. 

Tile No. 29

Martin Luther (1483 - 1546) was a German theologian and reformer whose thought and writings, and most notably his Ninety-Five Theses challenging papal authority and the corrupt practice of selling indulgences, served as a catalyst for the Protestant Reformation. Luther’s translation of the Bible into vernacular German provided worshipers unmediated access to their sacred texts, further undermining the religious monopoly of Rome. Lutheranism rapidly spread across Northern Europe and Scandinavia, and today there are over 75 million Lutheran adherents in 99 countries around the world. This passage, referring to the need for true discipleship to transcend what we can comprehend, was itself quoted by the 20th Century German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his influential 1937 book The Cost of Discipleship. 

Tile No. 30

Annie Dillard (1945- ) is an American poet, essayist, novelist and teacher. Dillard grew up in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania (described in her memoir An American Childhood), and studied writing at Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, where she was to write the journals that would become her first prose work, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the source of this quotation. This Pulitzer Prize-winning work traces the author’s spiritual reflections across a year of life in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and is generally regarded as a contemplative masterpiece, often compared to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Soon after Dillard lived for a time in the Bellingham area teaching at Western Washington University, and the area figures heavily in her metaphysical work Holy the Firm, and in her first novel The Living, set among settlers and indigenous peoples on Puget Sound in the latter part of the 19th Century. In 2014, Dillard was awarded a National Humanities Medal, citing her profound reflections on life and nature.

Tile No. 31

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 - 2018) was a popular and internationally respected poet and novelist known for her visionary science fiction and fantasy. Coming of age in Berkely, California, Le Guin was studying on a Fulbright fellowship in France when she married, giving up her studies and following her husband Charles to Portland, Oregon, where she began pursing writing in earnest. LeGuin first garnered widespread acclaim for her 1968 novel The Wizard of Earthsea, which introduced elements of Taoist and Native American spirituality into High Fantasy, an original approach that became a hallmark of her thought-provoking works. The next year her novel The Left Hand of Darkness - the source of this quotation – brought readers to a planet whose “ambisexual” inhabitants are non-binary, with no assigned gender. Over a career spanning half a century, Le Guin garnered numerous awards including eight Hugos, six Nebulas for best novel, and twenty-four Locus awards. 

Tile No. 32

“A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.”

Lao Tzu (6th-4th Century BCE), whose name is an honorific title meaning “old master,” is the semi-legendary founder of Taoism, one of the oldest and most revered philosophical and religious traditions of ancient China. The popular proverbial saying quoted here is from the 64th section of the Tao Te Ching, the foundational text of Taoism whose title translates as “the Way of Virtue.” This section of the text discusses the importance of proceeding to attend to the small things with simplicity, letting the big things take care of themselves. More than just a caution against procrastination, it is an assurance that thoughtfully attending to what we are engaged in from the very start, and at each step along the way, will help us to avoid big problems down the road, allowing us to remain in balance without undue strife. This approach supports the Taoist doctrine of “wu wei,” translated as “non-doing” or effortless action.

Tile No. 33

Author, playwright, poet and activist James Baldwin (1924 – 1987) was and continues to be a powerful voice in American society and literature. Born and raised in Harlem, Baldwin spent much of his adult life living in both France and America, producing a string of plays, novels such as the semi-autobiographical Go Tell It On the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room, and powerful essay collections such as Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time that helped establish Baldwin as a leading voice in the Civil Rights movement. The passage quoted here is from Baldwin’s “For a Hypothetical Novel,” an address originally delivered at San Francisco State College on October 22, 1960 and subsequently included in his bestselling essay collection Nobody Knows My Name. In this section he refers to the popular and disastrous myth that American is a free country, suggesting that in their apathy Americans may not want to be truly free. He suggests that in a country that so profoundly reflects the desires of its people, it is the job of the writer to help those people see who they truly are, and who they may become.

Tile No. 34

Lindy West (1982- ) is a Seattle author, performer and cultural critic who has brought her forthright humor to bear on popular culture, politics, fat acceptance, and the empowerment of women and marginalized people. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, The Guardian, The Stranger and other media, and is the co-founder of the reproductive rights campaign #ShoutYourAbortion. This quotation is the concluding passage to West’s 2016 book Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, in which the author declares how she, and each one of us, can build a better world by consciously breaking down boundaries, standing up to trolls and bullies, listening to and fighting for diverse voices, and exhibiting compassion and kindness. 

Tile No. 35

William Least-Heat Moon (1939- ) is a critically acclaimed Missouri writer of European and Osage ancestry known for his offbeat travelogues that explore locales overlooked by others. His bestselling 1982 debut Blue Highways recounts Least-Heat Moon’s journeys in an Econoline van along less travelled roads – often marked in blue on road atlases – where he met and conversed with a broad cross-section of Americans. His 1991 book PrairyErth created a “deep map” that delved into the landscape, people and history of Chase County, Kansas. The quoted passage is from a chapter in Least-Heat Moon’s Here, There, Elsewhere: Stories from the Road in which he expresses his love of exploring on foot: “I love walking in all its variations: the stroll, saunter, tramp, traipse, trek, ramble, constitutional, cross-country hike, and – at certain times – the night walk, a kind of wakeful noctambulation into a route darkness can make dreamlike and salutary to the imagination.”

Tile No. 36

Dylan Thomas (1914 – 1953) was a celebrated Welsh poet and author whose rhythmically inventive lyric poetry - and impressive readings of it - earned him a popular following in his lifetime that continues to this day. Among his most famous works are his poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” his play for voices Under Milkwood, and his story A Child’s Christmas in Wales. The lines quoted here are taken from Thomas’s “Poem in October,” in which the poet goes for a walk around the seaside town of Laugharne early on the morning of his thirtieth birthday, contemplating his long dead childhood and ending with a wish that he might still walk these hills a year hence. In the 1950s Thomas became a literary celebrity in the United States, and he died in New York City, a fortnight after his 39th birthday.

Tile No. 37

Octavia E. Butler (1947 – 2006) was a groundbreaking science fiction author whose works often centered marginalized voices, helping to inspire many writers and the flourishing Afrofuturist literary movement. Born and raised in Pasadena, California, Butler began reading and writing speculative fiction at an early age. She published extensively in the 1970s and ‘80s, winning the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards, among others, and was the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. In 1993 she published the dystopian novel Parable of the Sower, which is the source of this quotation, a quotation from the newly created scriptures of Earthseed, a Utopian response to the rise of a fascist theocracy in American, circa 2026. Butler’s sequel, Parable of the Talents, followed this movement to the foundation of a new society called Acorn. Having moved to Seattle in 1999, Butler had planned a third book, Parable of the Trickster, in which humans sought a new home in space, but was unable to write the book before her untimely death in 2006.

Tile No. 38

Zora Neale Hurston (1891 – 1960) was an American author, anthropologist and folklorist associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston came of age in the all-black town Eatonville, Florida, which became the setting for many of her books. She described her childhood in the 1926 essay “How It Feels To Be Colored Me,” the source of this quotation, in which she recalls learning about racism at the age of thirteen when her family moved to Jacksonville where, “thrown against a sharp white background,” she found herself defined by race. Still, she writes, “I am not tragically colored,” resolving not to be defined by others but to sharpen her oyster knife and get about “the game of getting.” Hurston went on to publish now classic novels such as Their Eyes Were Watching God, and a work of literary anthropology, Mules and Men. She fallen into almost total obscurity when her work was rediscovered in the 1970s by author Alice Walker, who erected a stone on her then unmarked grave, duly praising her as a “Genius of the South.”

Tile No. 39

Bill Gates III (1955 -) is a Seattle computer programmer and entrepreneur who co-founded the Microsoft Corporation. Working with his high school classmate Paul Allen, Gates created his first computer programs in his teens, and went on to create software for microcomputers, most notably MS-DOS and Windows, which remains the most widely used operating system on personal computers worldwide. The quotation is taken from his 1995 book The Road Ahead, in which Gates offers a high level view of the future of information, cautioning the reader not to put too much reliance on currently successful technology as a predictor of what lies around the next bend. Routinely ranked among the world’s wealthiest people, Gates has also become known for his philanthropy, working through The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to address humanitarian crises around the world, and enhance education and access to technology in the U.S.

Tile No. 40

Mary Oliver (1925 – 2019) was a popular and prolific American poet known for her reflective observations of the natural world. Born near Cleveland, Ohio, she eventually settled in Provincetown, Massachusetts. American Primitive, her fifth collection of poetry, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984, and her New and Selected Poems won a National Book Award in 1992. Oliver was an esteemed teacher, and her A Poetry Handbook has become a classic text for poets young and old. A dedicated walker, Oliver often turned her daily walks into nature poetry characterized by moving simplicity and spiritual resonance. The lines quoted here are from Oliver’s poem “It Was Early,” originally published in her 2009 collection Evidence, in which the poet recounts an early morning walk through the pines along a marsh, as she observes the life flourishing around her. 

Tile No. 41

Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862) was an American essayist, poet and thinker associated with transcendentalism. Thoreau was born and lived his life around Concord, Massachusetts, most notably for some years in a cabin owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson at Walden pond, an experience he recorded in his best known book, Walden, or, A Life in the Woods. A proponent of simple living in accordance with nature, Thoreau’s work has had a profound and lasting influence on myriad writers and thinkers, and on environmentalism. The lines quoted here are taken from Thoreau’s lecture Walking, or The Wild, which he delivered numerous times in the 1850s, and which was first published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1862, shortly after his death. Although little remarked during his lifetime, Thoreau’s essay on Civil Disobedience, in which he wrote of the citizen’s moral obligation to resist unjust laws such as those supporting slavery, helped shape political and social movements across the 20th century, influencing the life work of Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., among others. 

Tile No. 42

Karle Wilson Baker (1878 – 1960) was a popular Texas poet and author. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, after attending the University of Chicago she settled in the small town of Nacagdoches where she worked as a school teacher and contributed fiction and poetry to such national magazines as Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly and The Century. The lines here are from Baker’s poem “Good Company,” published in her 1919 debut collection Blue Smoke. Her poems were prized for their poignant simplicity, and her collection Dreamers on Horseback was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1931, which went to Robert Frost’s Collected Poems.

Tile No. 43

“There are no limits. There are only plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.”

Bruce Lee / Lee Jun-fan (1940 – 1973) was a celebrated martial artist, teacher, actor, and director who developed his own hybrid martial arts philosophy named Jeet Kun Do, or the Way of the Intercepting Fist. Raised in Hong Kong, Lee moved to Seattle when he was eighteen where he studied drama and philosophy at the University of Washington, began teaching martial arts, and met his wife Linda Emery. After playing a succession of supporting roles in Hollywood, Lee rose to international superstardom with a succession of Hong Kong filmed martial arts films. Just days after the release of Enter the Dragon, Lee died from an allergic reaction to a painkiller, and his grave in Seattle’s Lakeview cemetery remains the focus of global pilgrimage to this day. The quotation is taken from Lee’s posthumously published book The Tao of Jeet Kun Do, a collection of his thoughts on martial arts and life. 

Tile No. 44

Leija Farr (1998 - ) served as Seattle’s inaugural Youth Poet Laureate in 2015/16. Her poems explore topics of social justice, womanhood and self-love, and her popular poem “For Black Boys,” published in her 2016 collection Outweigh the Gravity, addressed issues of toxic masculinity and the dehumanization of young black males. The lines quoted here are taken from Farr’s poem “Painted World,” in her debut collection Battered Yet Beautiful, published when she was a sophomore at Seattle’s Cleveland High School, in which she invites the reader to paint this world,  “…Because me and you have brushes that can make masterpieces of broken pieces, loving what once stabbed us.” 

Tile No. 45

John Burroughs (1837 – 1921) was a writer and naturalist. Born and raised in New York’s Catskill mountains, he often wrote about his time hiking and fishing in this area. He was an admirer and promoter of the poet Walt Whitman, and together with his friends John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt was a major proponent of America’s nascent conservation movement. Burroughs Mountain in Mt. Rainier National Park is named in his honor. The passage quoted here is from the opening chapter of Burroughs’ 1886 book Signs and Seasons, in which he suggests that rather than travelling the world in search of picturesque spectacles, we have only to open our eyes and minds and appreciate the natural beauty all around us, even in our own back yards. 

Tile No. 46

Dr. Suess / Theodore Suess Geisel (1904 – 1991) was a beloved author and illustrator of popular children’s books. Suess published his book for children, To Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street, in 1937, and went on to publish over fifty picture books filled with his playfully rollicking rhymes and dynamic, whimsical cartoons. Many of these books slyly addressed social issues, such as environmentalist (The Lorax), racial equality (The Sneetches), and rampant consumerism (How the Grinch Stole Christmas). This quotation is taken from Seuss’s encouraging envoi to life Oh, The Places You’ll Go, the last of Suess’s books published during his lifetime, and a frequent gift for graduates ranging from kindergarten to college. 

Tile No. 47

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882) was an American essayist, poet, lecturer and transcendentalist philosopher. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School and pastor, he later broke away from what he felt were the antiquated and backward-looking traditions of the church, embracing then radical ideas about the divinity of nature and eventually incorporating Asian spiritual beliefs into a distinctly American philosophical tradition. An ardent abolitionist and proponent of self-reliance, Emerson was a prolific public speaker, known in his lifetime as the Sage of Concord. This quotation is taken from Education, an essay created after Emerson’s death compiled from various commencement addresses by his son Edward, for his Complete Works. The passage echoes the message of his foundational essay Nature, in which he praises the importance of time spent directly observing nature for those who would acquire wisdom and understanding. 

Tile No. 48

Nikita Gill (1987 -) is a poet and writer with an international following across a number of social media platforms. Born in Dublin and raised in New Delhi, she now lives in the UK. Writing poems since the age of twelve, Gill began posting brief, shareable poems on Instagram in 2015, where her cathartic works on themes of loneliness, anxiety, alienation and heartbreak have created strong emotional connections with a legion of fans. Her work is influenced by the sexism and objectification she experienced while growing up, and she has said she often writes to her younger self. The passage quoted here is from her poem “Reinvention,” an ode to continual self-renewal from her 2017 collection Wild Embers: Poems of Rebellion, Fire and Beauty. 

Tile No. 49

“Traveler, there is no path,
Paths are made by walking.”

Antonio Machado (1875 – 1939) was a poet from Seville associated with the Spanish literary and aesthetic movement ‘The Generation of ’98.’ His introspective symbolist early verse was influenced by time spent in fin de siècle Paris, but with his 1912 collection Campos de Castilla (The Plains of Castille) he turned his focus outward onto the people and landscapes of Spain. Just weeks after this book’s publication, his young wife Leonor died of tuberculosis, and in 1917 he published a considerably revised, more elegiac version which included poems dedicated to Leonor and a series of reflective proverbs about life’s unpredictable journey, from which these lines are quoted. Thereafter, Machado’s verse would be characterized by a spare, mystical existentialism. 

Tile No. 50

“It is only the first step which takes the effort.”

Madame Marie Vichy-Deffand (1696 – 1780) was a doyenne of literature and the arts who was celebrated for her salons, which included many of the great thinkers of the day including Voltaire, Montesquieu, and D’Alembert. The Dorothy Parker of her day, she was known for her droll witticisms, including the line quoted here. The Cardinal de Polignac had been holding forth on the legendary martyrdom of Saint Denis, who after he was decapitated by the Romans was purported to have walked for some miles to the site where his cathedral would later be erected, holding his head – which preached a sermon along the way - in his hands, to which Madame Deffand quipped “The distance is nothing: it is only the first step that costs.”

Tile No. 51

Archimedes (287 – 212 BCE) was a Greek mathematician and engineer whose pioneering discoveries earned him a lasting reputation as one of the greatest minds of the ancient world. The rediscovery of Archimedes’ mathematical treatises provided inspiration for such Renaissance thinkers as Kepler and Galileo, and much lore surrounds his practical inventions, including the familiar but probably apocryphal story of his realization of how to calculate mass via the displacement of water, at which he was purported to have leapt from his bath and run naked down the streets shouting “I have found it!,” or “Eureka!” The quoted passage refers to the power of the lever to move objects; while Archimedes did not invent the lever, he did conceive the mathematical laws that explained the principles of their use. 

Tile No. 52

“Give me silence, give me water, hope
Give me the struggle, the iron, the volcanoes.”

Pablo Neruda (1904 – 1973) was a Nobel prize-winning Chilean poet and statesman known for his work in a wide range of styles including epic verse, poems of protest, and love poetry. Born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, Neruda began writing verse and adopted his pen name while still in his teens. Encouraged by his teacher, the fellow Nobel winning poet Gabriela Mistral, Neruda wrote poetry while travelling the world in a number of diplomatic posts. His eventual return to Chile inspired his poem Alturas de Macchu Picchu (From the Heights of Macchu Picchu), an epic contemplation of the lives, deaths and legacies of the ancient Incans. Our quotation is taken from the concluding lines of this poem, in which Neruda sings out to his ancestors, imploring them to “Hasten to my veins and to my mouth. Speak through my words and my blood.” 

Tile No. 53

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 – 1882) was an American poet and translator whose melodious rhyming narratives made him easily the most popular versifier of his day. Often inspired by legends and folk traditions, his poems The Song of Hiawatha, Evangeline, and The Ride of Paul Revere might be heard read aloud at hearths in the United States and Europe alike. A gifted polyglot, Longfellow was also known for his translations, including the first rendering of Dante’s Divine Comedy into English. This quotation is from the poem “The Rainy Day” is from his early collection Ballads and Other Poems which also included “The Wreck of the Hesperus” and “The Village Blacksmith,” and which helped establish Longfellow as a household name.

Tile No. 54

Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955) was a Nobel Prize-winning German theoretical physicist whose theory of relativity and other discoveries revolutionized our understanding of the universe and paved the way for quantum physics. This quotation is taken from a 1952 letter to Einstein’s lifelong friend and colleague, the Swiss/Italian engineer Michele Besso. Besso had asked Einstein if there existed any demonstrable direction for the movement of time. Einstein replied that no rational theory had yet been developed to account for the facts they already had, hence more speculation was needed. Einstein recalled this discussion a few years later in a letter to Besso’s family days after the death of his friend. Reflecting that Besso had preceded him in leaving this strange world, he comforted them with the reminder that as Einstein and Besso both understood it, the flow of time is merely a “tenacious illusion.” Einstein himself died a few weeks later.

Tile No. 55

Harold Wilson (1916 – 1995) served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during the much of the 1960s and 1970s, winning four general elections as leader of the Labour Party. Wilson presided over an era of massive social change, and is known for keeping British troops out of Vietnam and for a raft of progressive reforms including decriminalizing homosexuality, relaxing state censorship, legalizing abortion and eliminating capital punishment. Despite this shift to the left, Wilson was famously pragmatic and reticent in his politics, as this quotation suggests. Wilson was in fact known to wear a simple workingman’s nylon raincoat when out and about. 

Tile No. 56

Helen Keller (1880 – 1968) was an American author, speaker and activist. Having lost her eyesight and hearing at the age of 19 months, Keller would later learn how to read and write with the aid of her teacher and lifelong companion Annie Sullivan, and eventually to speak and lip read. Starting with The Story of My Life, Keller wrote a number of popular books on her life, faith and politics, becoming a celebrated public speaker around the world and powerful advocate for the rights of people with disabilities. The quotation is taken from her 1903 book Optimism, where Keller recounts the gifts that education has brought to her, and to the world. She writes “Tolerance is the first principle of community; …no loss by flood and lightning, no destruction of cities and temples by the hostile forces of nature, has deprived man of so many noble lives and impulses as those which his intolerance has destroyed.”

Tile No. 57

William Faulkner (1897 – 1962) was a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of novels and stories, and is celebrated as one of the most original and influential voices in American literature. In such novels as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, Faulkner explored America’s legacy of racial hatred and hurt in lush, stylistically revelatory stream-of-consciousness prose. The quote is taken from Faulkner’s essay “On Fear: The South in Labor: Mississippi,” published in the June 1956 edition of Harper’s Magazine. Written during the height of the anti-communist red scare, Faulkner’s article refers to fear of white Southerners in resisting integration and civil rights, and how America must overcome this domestic threat to freedom if we are ever to resist threats from abroad, and to lead by example.  

Tile No. 58

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 – 1968) was a Nobel Prize-winning American activist and minister who was the eloquent and most prominent leader of the civil rights movement, active from the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 until his assassination in 1968. Inspired by the work of Quaker activist Bayard Rustin and the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. King advocated non-violent resistance, a tactic employed in numerous campaigns including marches in Birmingham and Selma Alabama, and the epochal 1963 March on Washington. This quotation was recalled by Marian Wright Edelman, activist and founder of the Children’s Defense Fund who worked with Dr. King and helped to carry on his work on the Poor People’s Campaign. In 1986, King County, originally named after slave-owning vice president Rufus DeVane King, rededicated itself in the name Martin Luther King Jr.

Tile No. 59

John Updike (1932 – 2009) was a prolific and acclaimed American author known for his keen, observant portrait of the middle class. Out of over sixty novels, story, poetry and essay collections, he is perhaps best known for his quartet of novels written between 1960 and 1990, tracing the life of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, two of which won Pulitzer Prizes. Saying that his goal was “to give the mundane its beautiful due,” Updike was renowned for his masterful prose style. The quote here is from the essay “A Soft Spring Night in Shillington” in Updike’s 1989 Memoir Self-Consciousness, in which the author wanders the darkened streets of his boyhood town, feeling nostalgic and self-conscious, and blessed by the falling rain.

Tile No. 60

Withrop Sargeant (1903 – 1986) was an American violinist and music critic. Born in San Francisco, he played with symphonies there and in New York before turning to music journalism in the 1930s. He enjoyed an illustrious career as editor and writer for Time, Life and the The New Yorker. The quotation is taken from the opening lines of a June, 1978 New Yorker article “The Ring’s the Thing,” on Seattle Opera’s ambitious Wagnerian Ring Cycle, and its equally ambitious impresario Glynn Ross who helped popularize opera in the Northwest, drawing audiences from around the world to this erstwhile “aesthetic dustbin” (as conductor Sir Thomas Beecham described Seattle in 1941) to experience Wagner. Sergeant introduces the then largely unknown city to his readership as small but cosmopolitan, with fresh air, beautiful views and mild weather.

Tile No. 61

Jean Toomer (1894 – 1967) was an American poet and novelist associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Toomer’s literary reputation is largely based on his 1923 modernist novel Cane comprised of scenes reflecting the lives of poor Southern blacks and cultural elites in Washington D.C., and the challenges faced by a black Northerner in the South. Toomer’s psychological insights about race are related to his own mixed-race heritage, and the author himself attended both all-black and all-white schools, and resisted binary racial identity. Toomer’s later writing focused on his own spiritual quest under the tutelage of mystic George Gurdjieff, and included many aphoristic sayings, including the one quoted here. 

Tile No. 62

“Success when old: the climb up downhill.”

Maria Luisa Spaziani (1923 – 2014) was a prolific Italian literary critic and author of two novels and several books of poetry. Known for her idiosyncratic, witty style, arresting imagery and ironic, thought-provoking takes on the human condition and the ironies of life, Spaziani resisted being pigeonholed as either feminine or feminist.

Tile No. 63

Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946) was an American writer known for her iconoclastic writings, as well as fostering many of the greatest writers and artists of the 20th Century in her famed Paris salon. Stein’s prose was characterized by experimentation, lack of punctuation, and playful stream of consciousness. Stein’s best known work was The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which she wrote about Paris in the 1920s through the eyes of her lifelong partner. The quotation is taken from Stein’s lecture What Are Master-Pieces And Why Are There So Few Of Them?, in which the author in her trademark striking style contrasts the genius of writers who are true originals, or entities, with those who write in search of the kind of identity that relies on other people, or even little dogs. 

Tile No. 64

Louise Erdrich (1954 - ) is an acclaimed American author whose psychologically rich novels explore the historical and contemporary lives of Indigenous people in the Midwest. A member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, Erdrich has created a vast interrelated fictional world highlighting the intersection of traditional Ojibwe lifeways and culture with the many challenges faced by native individuals. The quotation is from Erdrich’s debut National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel Love Medicine, from the chapter “The Good Tears: 1983,” narrated by the promiscuous free spirit Lulu Lamartine. Lulu unapologetically explains how her “wild and secret ways” constitute her open hearted, full throated embrace of life despite its cruel tragedies, as she rejects the judgements and limitations that our oppressive, shame-based society would seek to place on her. 

Tile No. 65

William James (1842 – 1910) was an influential American philosopher and pioneering psychologist. A major proponent of pragmatist philosophy, James championed the empirical approach to understanding, rejecting mere theory in favor of knowledge with practical consequences, or “the difference that makes a difference.” In his classic The Varieties of Religious Experience, James applied this science-based objective approach to matters of faith and belief. In this quotation from James’s 1890 masterwork The Principles of Psychology, James compares the wise person’s selective approach to knowledge with the well-read person’s mastery of “the art of skipping,” asserting the vital importance of ignoring and inattention to mental progress. William James’s brother Henry was no less a master of psychological insight, as expressed in his now classic novels.

Tile No. 66

“I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.”

Simone de Beauvoir (1908 – 1986) was a French author, existentialist philosopher and activist best known for her influential 1949 book The Second Sex, a foundational text in 20th century feminist thought which shed its revelatory light on the treatment of women throughout history. In addition to philosophical and political works, de Beauvoir wrote novels such as The Mandarins, a fictionalized account of her association with Jean Paul Sartre and other existentialist thinkers in the postwar period. Similarly, de Beauvoir’s experiences during the German occupation is reflected in her 1945 novel The Blood of Others, the source of this quotation. In these lines, the communist and leader in the resistance movement Jean struggles with the distance between his aspirations for a utopian society where all are free, and the not-so-liberating effect of his actual existence upon others.   

Tile No. 67

Stephen Crane (1871 – 1900) was an American author and poet whose meteoric literary career produced the early naturalistic novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and the anti-romantic Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage. His short story The Open Boat was inspired by a shipwreck he survived while working as a war correspondent. He also wrote terse, allegorical lines in free verse, unusual for the time. This brief poem, quoted in its entirety, was originally published in Crane’s 1899 collection War is Kind. It was written as the author struggled with debt and the tuberculosis that would soon end his life. All but forgotten after his death, he emerged from obscurity decades later as one of the most innovative and influential authors of his era. 

Tile No. 68

Tamara Madison-Shaw is an Atlanta-based poet and spoken word artist. Her works have appeared in The African American Literature Forum, Portland Review, KOLA, Sisterfire, and her spoken arts celebration “On My Way Home,” from which these lines are taken, appeared in Seattle Poets and Photographers: A Millennium Reflection. Madison-Shaw has worked as an artist-in-residence with various schools, community organizations and correctional facilities, including the Seattle Arts and Lectures Writers in the Schools Program. 

Tile No. 69

Seanan McGuire (1978 -) is a popular and prolific author of speculative fiction, writing urban fantasy under her own name, and science fiction under the name Mira Grant. Her works, which are known for featuring characters from a diversity of genders, sexual orientations and cultural backgrounds, have garnered her a wide range of prizes including Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy and John Campbell awards. This quotation is from her 2017 novel Down Among the Sticks and Bones, sequel to the award-winning Every Heart a Doorway. It is the story of twin sisters Jacqueline and Jillian, who open a trunk in their attic that contains a staircase descending to a mysterious destination. No sooner do the pair head down the stairs, than the trunk closes and locks behind them. 

Tile No. 70

Rebecca Solnit (1961 - ) is an American author who has written titles on a range of topics including history, political activism, social change and feminism. Solnit grew up in San Francisco, received her master’s degree in journalism from U.C. Berkeley, and is a regular contributor to media including The Guardian and Harper’s Magazine. Her 2014 essay collection Men Explain Things to Me became a popular feminist tract helping to popularize the #mansplaining meme, and her 2004 inspirational book Hope in the Dark has been reissued multiple times. This quotation is from Solnit’s 2001 book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, in a chapter exploring the city of Paris as “a collection of stories, a memory of itself made by the walkers in the streets.” Solnit has further explored psychogeography in a collection of idiosyncratic multi-faceted atlases of San Francisco, New Orleans and New York. 

Tile No. 71

Henry Miller (1891 – 1980) was an American author and artist known for his frank, unvarnished writing on life, love and sex. Miller’s reputation as a cult literary figure was assured after The Tropic of Cancer and The Tropic of Capricorn, autobiographical accounts of his libertine years in pre-war Paris, were banned in the United States until 1961, on grounds of obscenity. His candid, raw style would come to influence Beat Generation writers such as Jack Kerouac, and both anticipated and helped fuel the sexual revolution of the 1960s. This quotation is from Miller’s 1941 essay collection The Wisdom of the Heart, from a chapter discussing Eric Gutkind’s 1937 book The Absolute Collective. Here, Miller agrees with the German Jewish philosopher’s argument that in dark, fanatical chapters of human history, times that bend towards death, there is a dire need for fearless, unreasonable leaps toward life. 

Tile No. 72

Dylan Thomas (1914 – 1953) was a celebrated Welsh poet and author whose rhythmically inventive lyric poetry - and impressive readings of it - earned him a popular following in his lifetime that continues to this day. Among his most famous works are his poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” his play for voices Under Milkwood, and his story A Child’s Christmas in Wales. The lines quoted here are taken from Thomas’s “Poem in October,” in which the poet goes for a walk around the seaside town of Laugharne early on the morning of his thirtieth birthday, contemplating his long dead childhood and ending with a wish that he might still walk these hills a year hence. In the 1950s Thomas became a literary celebrity in the United States, and he died in New York City, a fortnight after his 39th birthday.

Tile No. 73

Dame Elizabeth Wordsworth (1840 – 1932) was an English author and educator who advocated for a woman’s right to higher education. She founded Principal of Lady Margaret Hall for female undergraduates at Oxford in 1879, and nearby St. Hugh’s College in 1886. The great niece of the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth, she was herself a prolific author of popular verses and songs, among which is her lyric “Good and Clever,” from which our quotation is taken. The poem concludes: “But somehow ‘tis seldom or never / The two hit it off as they should, / The good are so harsh to the clever, / The clever, so rude to the good! / So friends, let it be out endeavour / To make each by each understood; / For few can be good, like the clever, / Or clever, so well as the good.”

Tile No. 74

Kenneth Grahame (1859 – 1932) was a Scottish writer best remembered for his children’s classics The Reluctant Dragon and his much beloved 1908 book The Wind in the Willows, a series of animal tales which recounts the various misadventures of Frog, Toad, Mole, Rat and Badger as they traipse, loaf, sail and - in Toad’s case - careen in an automobile around the countryside. The quoted passage is from this book, and it continues instructively: “Nothing seems really to matter, that’s the charm of it. Whether you get away or whether you don’t; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you’re always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you’ve done it there’s always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you’d much better not.” 

Tile No. 75

Shel Silverstein (1930 – 1999) was an American children’s author, poet, and cartoonist known for his offbeat rhymes and zany drawings. Silverstein was also a prolific songwriter, penning such songs as The Ballad of Lucy Jordan and the Grammy Award-winning Johnny Cash hit A Boy Named Sue. In 1964, Silverstein published The Giving Tree, an enigmatic fable about a boy who spends his life taking things from a selfless tree; it swiftly became one of the most popular children’s books of all time. This quotation is the title poem of Silverstein’s 1974 collection Where the Sidewalk Ends, in which the author invites us to head to a place beyond “where the smoke blows black / And the dark street winds and bends / …For the children, they mark, and the children, they know / The place where the sidewalk ends.”