Famous Quotes Ipsum

Art teaches nothing but the significance of life. the engine that gives its mysterious inner life to a work of art must be the subterranean expression of a wish, working its way to the surface of a narrative. in the artist's own experience, of course, art is fundamentally indefinable, unsayable; there is something sacred about its demands upon the soul, something inherently mysterious in the forms it takes, no less than its contents. my first thought about art, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else, a kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. that still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy. one can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar. always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or your predecessors. try to be better than yourself. lolita is famous, not i. i am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable last name. and may these characters remain / when all is ruin once again i may know the word but not say it / i may know the truth but not face it / i may hear a sound, a whisper sacred and profound / but turn my head, indifferent sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. it was only the first of many occasions during those months that seemed to take place out of time, or in a historical moment i had yet to identify. it's at night, when perhaps we should be dreaming, that the mind is most clear, that we are most able to hold all our life in the palm of our skull. i don't know if anyone has ever pointed out that great attraction of insomnia before, but it is so; the night seems to release a little more of our vast backward inheritance of instincts and feelings; as with the dawn, a little honey is allowed to ooze between the lips of the sandwich, a little of the stuff of dreams to drip into the waking mind. i wish i believed, as j. b. priestley did, that consciousness continues after disembodiment or death, not forever, but for a long while. three score years and ten is such a stingy ration of time, when there is so much time around. perhaps that's why some of us are insomniacs; night is so precious that it would be pusillanimous to sleep all through it! a "bad night" is not always a bad thing. it takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are. creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected. prayer is not an old woman's idle amusement. properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action. watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever. my religion is very simple. my religion is kindness. enough! or too much. great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion. there are two kinds of people: those who say to god, "thy will be done," and those to whom god says, "all right, then, have it your way." the form of government most suitable to the artist is no government at all. how many joys are crushed under foot because people look up at the sky and disregard what is at their feet? perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. he who has a 'why' to live can bear almost any 'how'. the universe is made of stories, not atoms. life is a struggle, but there's hope and beauty in the world. even though a lot of our songs are dark, there's oftentimes the strain of 'but we're powerful as individuals and we're loved and we're good and the things we struggle with are the things that teach us the most and help us to grow.' in the end, that's what matters. neurosis is the way of avoiding non-being by avoiding being..

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying. i could lay here and read all night. i am not able to fall asleep without reading. you have that time when your brain has nothing constructive to do so it rambles. i fool my brain out of that by making it read until it shuts off. i just think it's best to do something right up until you fall asleep. there is a certain kind of kid who is so in love with words that she kisses the pictures of authors on the jackets of books. i was one. all i ever wanted was to be a writer. though this yearning now seems like aspiring to be a blacksmith in the age of the automobile, my childhood image of what a writer did bestowed superhuman powers on the profession. a writer sat privately at her desk and made public things happen. the power was godlike. the sense of accomplishment had to be the same. making words slant across the page was like making rain. flowers grew in ink. hurricanes and revolutions were stirred up by the sound of pen scratching paper. people living deeply have no fear of death..

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. hope has two beautiful daughters: their names are anger and courage. anger that things are the way they are. courage to make them the way they should be. a ship in a harbor is safe - but that is not what ships were made for. saturday found him for the first time strolling alone through zurich, breathing in the heady smell of his freedom. new adventures hid around each corner. the future was again a secret. for as long as i can remember, i had been transparent to myself, unselfconscious, learning, doing, most of every day. now i was in my own way; i myself was a dark object i could not ignore. i couldn't remember how to forget myself. i didn't want to think about myself, to reckon myself in, to deal with myself every livelong minute on top of everything else - but swerve as i might, i couldn't avoid it. i was a boulder blocking my own path. i was a dog barking between my own ears, a barking dog who wouldn't hush. so this was adolescence..... clothes make the man. naked people have little or no influence on society. to talk to each other is but a more animated and audible thinking. the search for truth is more precious than its possession. a day is a miniature eternity. weekends don't count unless you spend them doing something completely pointless. it was only the first of many occasions during those months that seemed to take place out of time, or in a historical moment i had yet to identify. smile at each other, smile at your wife, smile at your husband, smile at your children, smile at each other -- it doesn't matter who it is -- and that will help you to grow up in greater love for each other. question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there is one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blind-folded fear. early in the novel that tereza clutched under her arm when she went to visit tomas, anna meets vronsky in curious circumstances: they are at the railway station when someone is run over by a train. at the end of the novel, anna throws herself under a train. this symmetrical composition - the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end - may seem quite 'novelistic' to you, and i am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as 'fictive', 'fabricated', and 'untrue to life' into the word 'novelistic'. because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. when the morning's freshness has been replaced by the weariness of midday, when the leg muscles give under the strain, the climb seems endless, and suddenly nothing will go quite as you wish - it is then that you must not hesitate. all religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. all these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom. my religion is very simple. my religion is kindness. religion is a daughter of hope and fear, explaining to ignorance the nature of the unknowable. enough! or too much. janis joplin taught me about passion. if you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want and all that is left is a compromise. so since i've been home, i've learned two important things: ethernet is a gift from god, and it just doesn't sound the same to listen to the indigo girls without two people singing along. every now and then, everybody is entitled to too much perfection. you teach what you have to learn. it is not necessary to have achieved perfection to speak of perfection. it is not necessary to have achieved mastery to speak of mastery. it is not necessary to have achieved the highest level of evolution to speak of the highest level of evolution. seek only to be genuine. strive to be sincere. moonlight is sculpture; sunlight is painting. the officials thought it was a cruel joke to leave us stranded in the desert with no way to get home. what they didn't realize was that we were home, soul-centered and strong, women who recognized the sweet smell of sage as fuel for our spirits. maybe that's not exactly how it happened. but that's the way it should have happened. and that's the way i like to remember it. if any individual live too much in relations, so that he becomes a stranger to the resources of his own nature, he falls, after awhile, into a distraction, or imbecility, from which he can only be cured by a time of isolation, which gives the renovating fountains time to rise up. are there not chapters in everybody's life that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of history? i always thought of myself as a house. i was always what i lived in. it didn't need to be big. it didn't even need to be beautiful. it just needed to be mine. i became what i was meant to be. i built myself a life. i built myself a house..