#tho

But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not. ↗

— Patti Smith

#patti-smith #robert-mapplethorpe #art

I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers – there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader. ↗

— Julian Barnes

#read #reader #art

To affect the quality of the day - that is the highest of the arts. ~Henry David Thoreau~ ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#art

Dad used to read aloud to us from Dickens and Kipling. My tastes were omnivorous. I read anything I could lay my hands on, but the memory that stays with me is that of my father reading the Jungle Books to us when we were young. Beautiful stories! ↗

— A.B. Guthrie

#childhood-memory #childhood-stories #dickens #interview-transcription #kipling

It was the soul of the machine, the ethological epicentre, the planetary ground zero of their commercial energy. I could almost feel it, shivering down like bomb-blasted rivers of glass from these undreaming towers of dark and light invading the snow-dark sky. ↗

— Iain M. Banks

#ethological-epicentre #new-york-city #snow-dark-sky #art

i want to bleed ink and shit prose. ↗

— Jonathan Culver

#authors #writing #art

When people have told me that because I am a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply, ruefully, that because I am a Catholic I cannot afford to be less than an artist. ↗

— Flannery O'Connor

#artist #catholic #writers #art

And it was told that as soon as Poseidon saw the young Goddess, who looked no more than eighteen years of age, by human reckoning, passion immediately overwhelmed him. Unlike all the other Goddesses & Nymphs of the Sea, Aphrodite was not naked. She wore a huge girdle around her slender waist which covered her breasts & her hips as well as her crotch & buttocks. And, thus, instead of impaling her with his trident, Poseidon was overcome with curiosity as to what she hid beneath her girdle. He thus introduced himself as the King & Sheriff of the Seas & told the young Goddess that, as such, no secrets should be kept from him by all those who wished to live in the sea. He would therefore request that she removed the girdle to show him what she hid beneath it. ↗

— Nicholas Chong

#age

It was the quartets of Beethoven (numbers 12,13,14, and 15) which over fifty years, created and expanded the the audience of listeners to the quartets of Beethoven, thus achieving, as all masterpieces do, progress if not in the quality of artists, at least in the company of minds, which is largely composed these days of what was missing when the work appeared: people capable of liking it. ↗

— Marcel Proust

#beethoven #genius #art

… a slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and-whip grading, a mule mentality which said, “If you don’t whip me, I won’t work.” He didn’t get whipped. He didn’t work. ↗

— Robert M. Pirsig

#art