- "Have you ever considered that those bits of paper have a life and feelings, have requests to make and stories to tell? I don't think you're giving life the attention it deserves." -- The Witch of Portobello
- "To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced and, having evoked it in oneself, then by means of movements, lines, colours, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others experience the same feeling -- this is the activity of art. Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by these feelings and also experience them." -- Leo Tolstoy
- "At the moment we see something beautiful, we undergo a radical decentering. Beauty ... requires us "to give up our imaginary position as the center ... A transformation then takes place at the very roots of our sensibility, in our immediate reception of sense impressions and psychological impressions." ... What happens, happens to our bodies. When we come upon beautiful things - they act like small tears in the surface of the world that pull us through to some vaster space; or they lift us ... letting the ground rotate beneath us several inches, so that when we land, we find we are standing in a different relation to the world, for we never cease to stand at the center of the world, for we never stood there. We willingly cede our ground to the thing that stands before us." -- Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just
aug 11 2010 ∞
jan 27 2011 +