Reasonable Quotes (page 119)
There was no control except the "mood of his power... and it is for this reason it is good you never heard him play someplace where the weather for instance could change the next series of notes-- then you should never have heard him at all. He was never recorded. He stayed away while others moved into wax history, electronic history, those who said later that Boldon broke the path. It was just as important to watch him stretch and wheel around the last notes or to watch nerves jumping under...
Michael Ondaatje
Dreams are rough copies of the waking soul Yet uncorrected of the higher will, So that men sometimes in their dreams confess. An unsuspected, or forgotten, self; -Since Dreaming, Madness, Passion, are akin. In missing each that salutory rein. Of reason, and the grinding will of man.
Pedro Calderon de la Barca
There is one fairly good reason for fighting - and that is, if the other man starts it. You see, wars are a great wickedness, perhaps the greatest wickedness of a wicked species. They are so wicked that they must not be allowed. When you can be perfectly certain that the other man started them, then is the time when you might have a sort of duty to stop them.
T. H. White
And of the sixth day yet remained. There wanted yet the master work, the end. Of all yet done: a creature who not prone And brute as other creatures but endued. With sanctity of reason might erect His stature and, upright with front serene, Govern the rest, self-knowing, and from thence. Magnanimous to correspond with Heaven, But grateful to acknowledge whence his good Descends, thither with heart and voice and eyes. Directed in devotion to adore And worship God supreme who made him chief. Of...
John Milton
Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. There's a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall into, the ol' "The audience is stupid. The audience only wants to go this deep. Poor us, we're marginalized because of TV, the great hypnotic blah, blah." You can sit around and have these pity parties for yourself. Of course this is bullshit. If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people. One possible reason is that the people it's speaking to have...
David Foster Wallace
Keep me up till five because all your stars are out, and for no other reason…Oh dare to do it Buddy! Trust your heart. You’re a deserving craftsman. It would never betray you. Good night. I’m feeling very much over-excited now, and a little dramatic, but I think I’d give almost anything on earth to see you writing a something, an anything, a poem, a tree, that was really and truly after your own heart.
J. D. Salinger
[T]hus one should not think that desire is repressed, for the simple reason that the law is what constitutes both desire and the lack on which it is predicated. Where there is desire, the power relation is already present: an illusion, then, to denounce this relation for a repression exerted after the event.
Michel Foucault