“The true Bohemian is a connoisseur of texture, color and sensation. While the bourgeoisie can experience excitement, a feeling of fulfillment only through consuming, the Bohemian is exhilarated by observation, by creation, by experience itself. . . .

Bohemians do not take comfort in consuming to fill the hollow emptiness of existence that rattles like small shattered bones; they find poetry in the free and everyday things: the pinked and silvered lights of Paris in early October, a spiderweb decked out in jewel-like dew, a nineteeth-century china tea set in an antique shop window next to a taxidermy fox, humble objects and books and paintings and conversations in a coffee shop, things overheard in a botanical garden or on a wharf. . . .

It is splendor in which the Bohemian lives, not squalor—the splendor of the creative mind—and it requires ingenuity, free-thinking and nerve.”

—Laren Stover, from Bohemian Manifesto: A Field Guide to Living on the Edge, 2004.