More than once I've awakened with tears running down my cheeks,
I have had to think whether I was crying
or whether it was involuntary like drooling.
(from an installation at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, early 1980s; for a long time, I didn't know the source/artist, but I eventually traced it to Jenny Holzer and a bench by Jenny Holzer with these words was on display at the High Museum in Atlanta when ARLIS/NA met there in spring 2007)
***
I'd give the world to have been photographed by Carl Van Vechten, but I was only a little boy when he died and hadn't done anything yet to distinguish myself as a homosexual or a modernist.
(Kevin Killian, in Likeness: portraits of artists by other artists (San Francisco: CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, 2004), p. 27)
***
Would my work function at all if it were a mere documentation of my sex life? Does Cindy Sherman sit at home with a clown's mask on her face, rolling around in her own vomit from time to time?
(Matthias Herrmann, in Hotel_tricks (Toronto: Art Metropole, 2006), inside back cover)
***
Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.
(Abraham Lincoln, in his second Inaugural Address, quoted by Dean Murphy in The New York times, Nov. 7, 2004)
***
We [Democrats] are the party that genuinely believes in government, and the role that government can play in society. I don't think we ought to apologize for that.
(Tom Daschle, Senator from South Dakota, 1987-2005; quoted in New York times, Dec. 12, 2004)
***
If I don't sleep for the next 16 days,
it will be like four more years.
(Bill Clinton, at the end of his presidency,
quoted in The New York times, Jan. 6, 2001)
***
Eros, weaver of myths.
Eros, sweet and bitter.
Eros, bringer of pain.
(text in painting by Cy Twombly,
seen at Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2 Jan. 2001)
***
He was not cut out to be a soldier, he thought, but neither were most of the young men of his class and acquaintance who went to fight. It was not wisdom which kept him away, he believed, but something closer to cowardice, and as he walked the cobbled streets of his new town, he almost thanked God for it.
(Henry, the narrator, in The master, a novel based on the life of Henry James, by Colm Tóibín)
***
I would rather sleep in Chartres Cathedral with the nearest toilet two blocks away than in a Harvard house with back-to-back bathrooms.
(Philip Johnson, quoted in obituary in N.Y. times, 27 January 2005)
***
Fewer and fewer things are not television.
(Herbert Muschamp, in an article on renovating Lincoln Center,
New York times, Arts & leisure, Jan. 2001)
***
Insanity is when you do things the way you’ve always done them and expect a different result.
(variously attributed to Albert Einstein and Ralph Waldo Emerson)
http://hangingtogether.org/?cat=9 - from report on RLG Forum (thanks, Günter)
***
"My mother made me a homosexual."
"If I give her some wool, will she make me one, too?"
(graffiti quoted by Silverstein, p. 52)
***
When life is like
the chaos of a bramble,
follow with your eyes
one branch ...
You'll find its beginning;
its end will touch
the freedom of the air.
Like so many endings in peace ...
(Christmas greeting by Dorothy Scorelle, 1983)
***
I have a different feeling in New York [City] than I do anywhere else. I feel like no harm is going to come to me, that this is my city. I almost feel like I know everybody and everybody knows me and we're all pals. Now, obviously, that can't be true, but so much of how you relate to life is how you feel. And that's my attitude in New York. I am a child of the city. The relationship is maternal.
(Richard Dean Parsons, New York times, Dec. 9, 2001)
***
If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.
(W.H. Auden)
***
If there is such a thing as a just war, then murder can be necessary for the sake of justice.
(W.H. Auden)
***
She had, however, a peculiar taste: she liked to receive cards. ... Nothing pleased her more than to find her hall table whitened with oblong morsels of symbolic pasteboard.
(Henry James, The portrait of a lady, p. 59 in Penguin classics edition)
***
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
(Arthur Conan Doyle, The sign of four)
***
Never lend books, for no one ever returns them, the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me.
(Anatole France)
***
How shall I ever find the grains of truth embedded in all this mass of paper?
(Virginia Woolf, A room of one's own)
***
Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities.
(Frank Lloyd Wright)
***
Put your money in your head, then no one can take it from you.
(Rita Mae Brown, Southern discomfort, p. 66)
***
What you get is a living, what you give is a life.
(D.W. Griffith, quoted in Lillian Gish's autobiography, conclusion)
***
All Lord Burlington's books which survive are in mint condition. None is torn, dog-eared, worn or appreciably thumbed, with the single exception of the copy of Palladio which he bought in Vicenza in 1719 and carried around with him on his pilgrimage to villas and churches in Venetia.
(James Lees-Milne, Earls of creation, p. 137-138)
***
If one has no hope and nothing to lose, no reason to obey law.
(Richard M. Nixon, in reference to riots, 1967?)
***
Chamber rules for the House of Lords require that all double-barreled names have hyphens.
(in an article on Andrew Lloyd Webber, aka Lord Lloyd-Webber,
in the New York times, 10 Jan. 2000, front page)
***
My father could walk in the sky.
He promised to teach me how,
But he left without saying goodbye,
I don't cry. I'm a grownup now.
(Duane Michals, caption for photo entitled
"My father could walk in the sky," 1989,
exhibited Pace MacGill Gallery, Feb. 2000)
***
On the positive side, I had a student from mainland China in a[n art history] survey class who wrote something like this about Renaissance art: "I was raised in communist China and they taught us religion was like a drug, it stole people's minds. But, I think religion must be a very powerful drug if it can inspire people to make art this beautiful."
(contribution to a discussion about bloopers and misconceptions on examinations and in papers, on CAAH list from Rett Lorance, 17 December 2005)
***
I want to live there again. I want to live in that dark alley named l’Impasse des Deux Anges, and have those little pointed jeweled blue velvet shoes at the Cluny copied, and get my perfumes from Molinard’s and go to Schiaparelli’s spring show to watch her ugly mannequins jerking about as if they were run with push buttons, hitching their belts down in back every time they turn, giving each other hard theatrical Lesbian stares. I want to light a foot-high candle to Our Lady of Paris for bringing me back, and go out to Chantilly to see if they’ve turned another page in the Duke’s Book of Hours. I’d like to dance again in that little guinguette in rue d’Enfert-Rochereau with the good-looking young Marquis -- what’s his name? descended from Joan of Arc’s brother. I want to go again to la Bagatelle and help the moss roses open; in cold springs, they get stuck, poor things, halfway -- all you do is loosen one outer petal and there it opens, before your eyes! I want to do that again. I’ll go again to Rambouillet through those woods that really do look just as Watteau and Fragonard saw them. And to St. Denis to see again the lovely white marble feet of kings and queens, lying naked together on the roof above their formal figures on the bier, delicate toes turned up side by side. I never saw such rainbows as I saw over the city of Paris, I never saw such rain either.
(Mrs. Treadwell, on going back to Paris, in Ship of fools by Katherine Anne Porter, p. 211-212)
***
Love the pasture, hate the people.
(pony, in Sharon Chickanzeff's dream, 30 October 2006)
***
In a few years' time, I'd [Bob Dylan] write and sing songs like "It's alright Ma (I'm only bleeding)," "Mr. Tambourine Man," "Lonesome death of Hattie Carroll," "Who killed Davey Moore," "Only a pawn in their game," "A hard rain's a-gonna fall" and some others like that. If I hadn't gone to the Theatre de Lys and heard the ballad "Pirate Jenny," it might not have dawned on me to write them, that songs like that could be written. In about 1964 and '65, I probably used about five or six of Robert Johnson's blues song forms, too, unconsciously, but more on the lyrical imagery side of things. If I hadn't heard the Robert Johnson record when I did, there probably would have been hundreds of lines of mine that would have been shut down -- that I wouldn't have felt free enough or upraised enough to write. I wasn't the only one who learned a thing or two from Johnson's compositions. Johnny Winter, the flamboyant Texan guitar player born a couple of years after me, rewrote Johnson's song about the phonograph, turning it into a song about a television set. Johnny's tube is blown and his picture won't come in. Robert Johnson would have loved that. Johnny, by the way, recorded a song of mine, "Highway 61 revisited," which itself was influenced by Johnson's writing. It's strange the way circles hook up with themselves. Robert Johnson's code of language was like nothing I'd heard before or since. To go with all of that, someplace along the line Suze had also introduced me to the poetry of French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud. That was a big deal, too. I came across one of his letters called "Je est un autre," which translates into "I is someone else." [sic] When I read those words the bells went off. It made perfect sense. I wished someone would have mentioned that to me earlier. It went right along with Johnson's dark night of the soul and Woody's hopped-up union meeting sermons and the "Pirate Jenny" framework. Everything was in transition and I was standing in the gateway. Soon I'd step in heavy loaded, fully alive and revved up. Not quite yet, though.
(Bob Dylan, Chronicles, volume one, 2004, p. 287-288)
***
I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for belief.
(Pier Paolo Pasolini, quoted in The New York sun, Nov. 29, 2007, review of Pasolini film series of the Film Society of Lincoln Center at Walter Reade Theater)
***
Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.
James Russell Lowell, poet, editor, and diplomat (1819-1891)
(quoted by Nancy Silverrod in her sigfile)
***
A closed mind is like a closed book: just a block of wood.
(Chinese Proverb)
(quoted by Nancy Silverrod in her sigfile)
***
[I] think one travels more usefully when alone, because he reflects more.
(Thomas Jefferson, quoted in Dr. Kimball and Mr. Jefferson by Hugh Howard (Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 62)
***
Write as much as possible in the presence of the actual object and return to it if you have second thoughts.
(J.J. Winckelmann, advice to Charles-Louis Clérisseau, quoted in Dr. Kimball and Mr. Jefferson by Hugh Howard (Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 62)
