#epiphany

Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air. ↗

— Leonard Bernstein

#art #creativity #epiphanic-moment #epiphany #inspirational

So i learned two things that night, and the next day, from him: the perfection of a moment, and the fleeting nature of it. ↗

— Margaret George

#epiphany #fiction #journey #life #loss

For the first time in his life he understood why the Bible called sex "knowing". Everything was different. Now he knew Dante. He'd known Dante. And wonder of wonders, Dante had known him right back. ↗

— Damon Suede

#gay #intimacy #love #relationships #sex

Now that his children had grown into their lives, their own children too, there was no one who needed more than the idea of him, and he thought maybe that was why he had this nagging feeling, this sense that there were things he had to know for himself, only for himself. He knew, of course he knew, that a life wasn't anything like one of those novels Jenny read, that it stumbled along, bouncing off one thing, then another, until it just stopped, nothing wrapped up neatly. He remembered his children's distress at different times, failing an exam or losing a race, a girlfriend. Knowing that they couldn't believe him but still trying to tell them that it would pass, that they would be amazed, looking back, to think it had mattered at all. He thought of himself, thought of things that had seemed so important, so full of meaning when he was twenty, or forty, and he thought maybe it was like Jenny's books after all. Red herrings and misdirection, all the characters and observations that seemed so central, so significant while the story was unfolding. But then at the end you realized that the crucial thing was really something else. Something buried in a conversation, a description - you realized that all along it had been a different answer, another person glimpsed but passed over, who was the key to everything. Whatever everything was. And if you went back, as Jenny sometimes did, they were there, the clues you'd missed while you were reading, caught up in the need to move forward. All quietly there. ↗

— Mary Swan

#epiphany #hindsight #life #literature #meaning

I've never known before what it feels like to want someone - not to want to hook up with them or whatever, but to want them, to want them. And now I do. So maybe I do believe in epiphanies. ↗

— John Green

#true-love #love

Katsa sat in the darkness of the Sunderan forest and understood three truths. She loved Po. She wanted Po. And she could never be anyone's but her own. ↗

— Kristin Cashore

#love

Whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion...Life on its own, without art to shape it, leaves you in confusion and chaos, but aesthetic emotion harmonizes what you know with what you feel to give you a heightened awareness and a sureness of your place in reality. ↗

— Robert McKee

#art #awareness #chaos #confusion #emotion

This was not of the nature of a Christlike lesson for Owen Meany to learn, as he lay in the manger, that someone you hate can give you a hard-on. ↗

— John Irving

#epiphany #sex #nature

Now the wren has gone to roost and the sky is turnin' gold And like the sky my soul is also turnin' Turnin' from the past, at last and all I've left behind ↗

— Ray Lamontagne

#epiphany #gold #heart #moving-on #redemption

What exactly was the difference? he wondered to himself. And who decided which people wore the striped pajamas and which people wore the uniforms? ↗

— John Boyne

#epiphany #holocaust #thoughts #holocaust