April 2013
92 posts
“As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.” —Ursula K. Le Guin
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
—Mary Oliver
“Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery. As is all art.” —Martha Graham
“Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.” —Agnes de Mille
“When we are doing something because it is expected of us or to please somebody else or because we are afraid of somebody else, we become further alienated from a sense of living authentically.
“If we just keep living out a role we know well, the cost of that is to become increasingly cut off from that which is in the collective unconscious, that which not only nourishes us, but also...
“The witching hour, somebody had once whispered to her, was a special moment in the middle of the night when every child and every grown-up was in a deep deep sleep, and all the dark things came out from hiding and had the world all to themselves.” —Roald Dahl, The BFG
“I think you have to see the face of death in order to start writing seriously. There are people who see the end quickly, like Rimbaud. When you start seeing it, you feel you have to rescue these things. Death is the great Maecenas, Death is the great angel of writing. You must write because you are not going to live any more.” —Carlos Fuentes
Pan with Us
by Robert Frost
Pan came out of the woods one day,—
His skin and his hair and his eyes were gray,
The gray of the moss of walls were they,—
And stood in the sun and looked his fill
At wooded valley and wooded hill.
He stood in the zephyr, pipes in hand,
On a height of naked pasture land;
In all the country he did command
He saw no smoke and he saw no roof.
That...
“This ability to persuade us of ‘truth,’ ‘authenticity,’ and ‘sincerity’ never comes from the novel’s resemblance to or association with the real world we readers inhabit. It comes exclusively from the novel’s own being, from the words in which it is written and from the writer’s manipulation of space, time, and level of reality. If the...
“Will I write a sentence that will just float off the page? Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it’s right, it’s easy. It’s the other way round, too. If it’s slovenly written, then it’s hard to read. It doesn’t give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.” —Maya Angelou
“Living by synchronicity isn’t merely about getting messages. It is about growing the poetic consciousness that allows us to taste and touch what rhymes and resonates in the world we inhabit, and how the world-behind-the-world reveals itself by fluttering the veils of our consensual reality.” —Robert Moss
“Having perfected our disguise, we spend our lives searching for someone we don’t fool.” —Robert Brault
“Make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of...
“Without passion, all the skill in the world won’t lift you above craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. Combining the two is the essence of the creative life.” —Twyla Tharp
“Dare he, for whom circumstances make it possible to realize his true destiny, refuse it simply because he is not prepared to give up everything else?” —Dag Hammarskjold
“A small owl has landed on the sill. Its head swivels back and forth. Perhaps its perch was blown down or it is disoriented by the storm. When the moon breaks through the clouds, we can see the owl staring inside at us. We don’t move. I’m praying, Please don’t come in the room. I am deathly afraid of birds, a holdover phobia from childhood, and yet I am entranced by...
“When Van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. He sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lamppost, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: ‘it is so beautiful I...
“You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature. How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter. If he or she is not disciplined no sympathetic magic will help. The trick is to make time—not steal it—and produce the fiction. If the stories come, if you get them written, you’re on...
“Recently I was talking with a writer who described something she did whenever she moved to her writing table. I don’t remember exactly what the gesture was—there is something on her desk that she touches before she hits the computer keyboard—but we began to talk about the rituals one goes through before beginning to write. I, at first, thought I didn’t have a...
“When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.” —Pablo Picasso
“Perhaps some of us have to go through dark and devious ways before we can find the river of peace or the high road to the soul’s destination.” —Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces
“Acts of bravery don’t always take place on battlefields. They can take place in your heart, when you have the courage to honor your character, your intellect, your inclinations, and yes, your soul by listening to its clean, clear voice of direction instead of following the muddied messages of a timid world.” —Anna Quindlen
“I have learned, as a rule of thumb, never to ask whether you can do something. Say, instead, that you are doing it. Then fasten your seat belt. The most remarkable things follow.” —Julia Cameron
“I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life—and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.” —Georgia O’Keeffe
“If you feel lost, disappointed, hesitant, or weak, return to yourself, to who you are, here and now and when you get there, you will discover yourself, like a lotus flower in full bloom, even in a muddy pond, beautiful and strong.” —Masaru Emoto, The Secret Life of Water
“The most beautiful people I’ve known are those who have known trials, have known struggles, have known loss, and have found their way out of the depths.” —Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work...
“The goal of life is rapture. Art is the way we experience it.” —Joseph Campbell
“The ground about him was studded gold and pale yellow with celandines and primroses and banked by the bridal white of densely blossoming sloe; where jubilantly green-tipped elders shaded the mossy banks of the little brook he had drunk from were clusters of moschatel and woodsorrel, most delicate of English spring flowers. Higher up the slope he saw the white heads of anemones, and beyond...
“We write to expose the unexposed.
“If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must.
“Otherwise you’ll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you’ve already been in.
“Most human beings are dedicated to keeping that one door shut. But the writer’s job is to see what’s behind it, to see the bleak unspeakable stuff, and to turn the...
“He domesticated and developed the native wild flowers. He had one hill-side solidly clad with that low-growing purple verbena which mats over the hills of New Mexico. It was like a great violet velvet mantle thrown down in the sun; all the shades that the dyers and weavers of Italy and France strove for through centuries, the violet that is full of rose colour and is yet not lavender; the...
“Plants grow most in the darkest hours preceding dawn; so do human souls. Nature always pays for a brave fight. Sometimes she pays in strengthened moral muscle, sometimes in deepened spiritual insight, sometimes in a broadening, mellowing, sweetening of the fibres of character,—but she always pays.” —William George Jordan
“You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you’re not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a...
“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.” —T.E. Lawrence
“The more scarred the work of art is by the battles waged on the borders between art and life, the more interesting it becomes.” —Alselm Kiefer
