#sca

I just find it fascinating, like everybody, to be in a different life. It's an escape. ↗

— Elizabeth McGovern

#escape #everybody #fascinating #find #i

Scapegrace leaped up. “I am the Killer Supreme! I make murder into an art form!” Skulduggery hit him again and Scapegrace did a little twirl before falling. ↗

— Derek Landy

#scapegrace #skulduggery #twirl #art

The ugly and stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live-- undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They never bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Henry; my brains, such as they are-- my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks-- we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#curse #dorian-gray #gods #good-looks #inspirational

[All the ancient wisdom] tells us that work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy; that shoddy or dishonest or self-serving work is our curse and our doom. We have tried to escape the sweat and sorrow promised in Genesis - only to find that, in order to do so, we must forswear love and excellence, health and joy. (pg. 44, "The Unsettling of America") ↗

— Wendell Berry

#excellence #genesis #joy #love #salvation

We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them. (pg. 43, "The Unsettling of America") ↗

— Wendell Berry

#product #work #art

I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings. ↗

— Jeanette Winterson

#flight #art

While art thrives on the blazing colours of scandal, literature blossoms on the dark soil of tragedy. ↗

— E.A. Bucchianeri

#artists #arts-and-humanities #books #classics #creativity

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#criticism #oscar-wilde #peril #read #surface

She raised her chin and her pale, black-fringed eyes sparkled in the moonlight. Ellen had never told her that desire and attainment were two different matters; life had not taught her that the race was not to the swift. She lay in the silvery shadows with courage rising and made the plans that a sixteen-year-old makes when life has been so pleasant that defeat is an impossibility and a pretty dress and a clear complexion are weapons to vanquish fate. ↗

— Margaret Mitchell

#courage

President Obama's reelection started the countdown for lawmakers to address the fiscal cliff and the statutory debt limit. Unless the President and House Republicans can agree on changes to current law, the U.S. economy will be in recession by spring. ↗

— Mark Zandi

#agree #changes #cliff #current #current law