#mer

When the waiter brought the cheese-board, there was a large carrot carved in the shape of a mermaid sitting between the Dolcelatte and the Pecorino. Teo could have sworn that the carrot-mermaid flexed her tail and plunged her little hand inside a smelly Gorgonzola. 'Tyromancy, ye know,' remarked the mermaid. 'The Ancient Art of Divination by Cheese.' Then she pulled her tiny hand out and inspected the green cheese-mold on her tiny fingers. 'Lackaday!' she moaned. 'Stinking! It goes poorly for Venice and Teodora, it do! ↗

— Michelle Lovric

#divination #foretelling #humour #mermaid #art

Heade’s calm is unsteady, storm-stirred; we respond in our era to its hint of the nervous and the fearful. His weather is interior weather, in a sense, and he perhaps was, if far from the first to portray a modern mood, an ambivalent mood tinged with dread and yet imbued with a certain lightness.The mood could even be said to be religious: not an aggressive preachment of God’s grandeur but a kind of Zen poise and acceptance, represented by the small sedentary or plodding foreground figures that appear uncannily at peace as the clouds blacken and the lightning flashes. ↗

— John Updike

#art #martin-johnson-heade #art

Nevertheless, we react to one a bit differently than we do to Rothko’s hovering panels or Barnett Newman’s stripes, though Whistler does approach their extremity of abstraction; part of our pleasure lies in recognizing bridges and buildings in the mist, and in sensing the damp riverine silence, the glimmering metropolitan presence. … The painting - a single blurred stripe of urban shore - is additionally daring in that the sky and sea are no shade of blue, but, instead, an improbable, pervasive cobalt green. Human vision is here taken to its limits, and modern painting, as a set of sensations realized in paint, is achieved. ↗

— John Updike

#art #james-mcneill-whistler #art

We Americans... like change. It is at once our weakness and our strength. ↗

— W. Somerset Maugham

#change #change

When we drug ourselves to blot out our soul's call, we are being good Americans and exemplary consumers. ↗

— Steven Pressfield

#art #consumerism #creativity #destiny #soul

So, verily, with every difficulty, there is relief; Verily, with every difficulty there is relief. Therefore, when thou art free (from thine immediate task), still labour hard, And to thy Lord turn [all] thy attention. ↗

— Anonymous

#allah #god #islam #mercy #quran

For an artist is not a consumer, as our commercials urge us to be. An artist is a nourisher and a creator who knows that during the act of creation there is collaboration. We do not create alone. ↗

— Madeleine L'Engle

#artist #consumer #consumerism #create #creating

I lived in a big bunkhouse of thirty farm workers with Leroy, who was a stranger to me in many ways because he was always talking about unions and unity. But he had a way of explaining the meanings of words in utter simplicity, like "work" which he translated into "power," and "power" into "security." I was drawn to him because I felt that he had lived in many places where the courage of men was tested with the cruelest weapons conceivable. ↗

— Carlos Bulosan

#filipino #filipino-american #filipino-authors #unions #courage

If there is heaven then there must be hell too, don't think that The God is merciful, he didn't create hell for himself. ↗

— John Art

#heaven #hell #merciful #art

Resilience is not what happens to you. It’s how you react to, respond to, and recover from what happens to you. ↗

— Jeffrey Gitomer

#gitomer #sales #attitude