#lang

I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, "Mamma, can I open the light?" She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art. It was a sort of metaphor, but she was not using it as ornamentation. ↗

— Ezra Pound

#language #poetry #age

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#reading #age

Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go. ↗

— Rebecca Solnit

#cities #language #possiblity #walking #architecture

A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; -- not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#books #language #life #reading #words

For, to my mind, this is a certain principle, that nothing is here treated of but the visible form of the world. He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. (on commenting the text of Genesis 1:6) ↗

— Jean Calvin

#astronomy #calvin #genesis #art

I'd never really been content with just churning out these slim volumes every three or four years. I've always tried to think of poetry as an active ingredient in the language rather than just something that appears between the covers of thin books. ↗

— Simon Armitage

#always #appears #been #between #books

Bleed me of art, and there won't be enough liquid left in me to spit! [Michelangelo Buonorotti] ↗

— Irving Stone

#artist #michelangelo #art

Actualmente, hablamos de lenguajes en plural, por tanto, de lenguajes cuyo significante no es la palabra: por ejemplo, el lenguaje del cine, de las artes figurativas, de las emociones, etcétera. Pero éstas son acepciones metafóricas. Pues el lenguaje esencial que de verdad caracteriza e instituye al hombre como animal simbólico es «lenguaje-palabra», el lenguaje de nuestra habla. ↗

— Giovanni Sartori

#art

As my friend Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe has argued persuasively, there is an element of positivity in the visible world, and in color particularly, that totally eludes the historicity of language, with its protocols of absence and polarity. The color red, as an attribute of the world, is always there. It is something other than the absence of yellow and blue--and, thus, when that red becomes less red, it becomes more one or the other. It never exists in a linguistic condition of degradation or excess that must necessarily derive from our expectations. ↗

— Dave Hickey

#art

its badness is so potent that it seems to undermine the very idea of literature, to expose the whole endeavour of making art out of language as essentially and irredeemably fraudulent ↗

— Mark O'Connell

#criticism #language #writing #art