[Photo Journal/ A-Z Photo Challenge] Q is for Queensland

It’s Tuesday in our part of the world. Time for Frizztext’s A-Z Photo Story Challenge. Letter this week is Q and I share photographs taken at the University of Queensland sometime in November of 2010. I simply fell in love with Brisbane: its laid-back, relaxed, and artsy vibe. I think a lot of it also has to do with the people I traveled with during this time. This was the very first international presentation of our research project called Semantics and Soul in Filipino Music – together with historical linguist, Professor Tuting Hernandez (who is our Featured Academic in GatheringBooks) and celebrated singer-songwriter from the Philippines, Noel Cabangon. You may want to check out my Experiencing-Queensland blogpost back in 2010. Lots of gorgeous pictures there as well.

Q is for Queensland

When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy. – Rumi

“University can teach you skill and give you opportunity, but it can’t teach you sense, nor give you understanding. Sense and understanding are produced within one’s soul.” 
― C. JoyBell C.

“What else can I do? Once you’ve gone this far you aren’t fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You’re overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn’t even make a good ditch-digger, I’d start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols – pipes, valves, cloacal conduits… No, no. I’ll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.” 
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“But if you tell folks you’re a college student, folks are so impressed. You can be a student in anything and not have to know anything. Just say toxicology or marine biokinesis, and the person you’re talking to will change the subject to himself. If this doesn’t work, mention the neural synapses of embryonic pigeons.” 
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught. The library, on the other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret. You don’t have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for yourself.” 
― Ray Bradbury

“What does all this mean finally, I kept asking like a college kid. Why does it make me want to cry? Maybe it’s that we are all outsiders, we are all making our own unusual way through a wilderness of
normality that is just a myth.” 
― Anne Rice, Exit to Eden