In the course of a week,  we came across a remarkable number of quotes secreted into the most unlikely places, in plain site.

Cooking one evening, we saw this on a can of plum tomatoes…

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. —John Muir

 

.. through Central Park one day, we came across a perfect line of Walk Whitman etched into a plaque on a bench…

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle 

Getting ready to send in our expired passport, we flipped through the pages to remind ourself of trips we had taken. How did we never notice the quotes at the top of each fold?

We send thanks to all the Animal life in the world. They have many things to teach us as people. We are glad they are still here and we hope it will always be so. —Excerpt from the Thanksgiving Address, Mohawk version

This is a new nation, based on a might continent, of boundless possibilities. —Theodore Roosevelt.

Every generation has the obligation to free men’s minds for a look at new worlds…to look out from a higher plateau than the last generation. — Ellison S. Onizuka

The unexpected quotes add another dimension to the everyday objects they adorn, “hitching them to everything else in the universe”, and spark a moment of thinking way beyond cans of tomatoes, and park benches and passports.  We wonder why more things are not woven through with quotes or fragments of poetry. Or are they, and we need only train our noticing a little?