- All children become sad in the late afternoon, for they begin to comprehend the passage of time. - Stephane Audeguy, The Theory of Clouds
- We can't begin with nothing because, logically, nothingness is the culmination of something. - Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel, The Singular Objects of Architecture
- In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk, the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work. - W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
- Yet, as a wheel moves smoothly, free from jars,/My will and my desire were turned by love,/The love that moves the sun and the other stars. - Dante, The Divine Comedy 3: Paradise
- Love found the rubble of the lady's ice. - Anita Albus, The Art of Arts
- Ours is the first age in which many thousands of the best-trained individual minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind.- Herbert Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of the Industrial Man
- All above him, the sky spans blue.- Ivar Ekeland, Mathematics and the Unexpected
- the electronic material also allows the 'spectator' the possibility of individual creative interaction, of participating in an event in his or her own 'virtual reality.'- Andrzej Wirth, Beyond Benjamin: Performative Artwork and its Resistance to Reproduction, in 'With the Sharpened Axe of Reason': Approaches to Walter Benjamin, ed. Gerhard Fischer
- "That it 'keeps going on like this' is the catastrophe."- Todd Dufresne, Tales from the Freudian Crypt: The Death Drive in Text and Context
- It's smart to use a dummy--especially when a dummy can do something better than a human can!- Suzanne Hilton, It's Smart to Use a Dummy
- The name alone, revealed through a natural death, not the living soul, vouches for that in man which is immortal.- Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms: Essays on Veblen, Huxley, Benjamin, et al
- art is not the forum of utopia....Of that greater (some)thing - the fulfilment of Utopia - one cannot speak, only bear witness.- Paul Scheerbart, qtd. in Detlef Mertins, "Walter Benjamin and the Tectonic Unconscious: Using Architecture as an Optical Instrument," in The Optic of Walter Benjamin, ed. Alex Coles
- Could we classify the luxuriant growth of objects as we do a flora or fauna, complete with tropical and glacial species, sudden mutations, and varieties threatened by extinction?- Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects
- What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.- Francis Bacon, Essays
- If anyone asks whether I have come out of my cave, you may tell them "not yet."- Randall E. Auxier, "In The Merry Old Matriarchy of Oz," in The Wizard of Oz and Philosophy: Wicked Wisdom of the West, eds. Randall E. Auxier and Phillip S. Seng
- For better and for worse, we are the threads that form the patterns on this now tattered cloth.- Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms: Essays on Veblen, Huxley, Benjamin, et al
- As they left the island, the sun was setting behind what remained of the old ruined fortress, producing a orange glow behind the shadow of its hills, like the serpent of the Ourobouraians, the fire that encompasses the totality and the void, that opens and closes onto itself, as ruled by the divine arrangement of the stars.- Pablo Helguera, Urÿonstelaii
- all the substantial realities of Flatland itself, appear no better than the offspring of a diseased imagination, or the baseless fabric of a dream.- Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
- Jan. 16th, 1832--The neighbourhood of Porto Praya, viewed from sea, wears a desolate aspect.- Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle
- Seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
- This first section aims to deprive, not to say rescue, the word reality of its ingrained, fixed, and limited meaning....It looks into the future rather than into the past, is drawn by purposes as well as impelled by drives, partakes of the liveliness of the incalculable human spirit--freedom in a unique sense survives.- Lawrence Leshan and Henry Margenau, Einstein's Space and Van Gogh's Sky: Physical Reality and Beyond
- The more elaborate phrases, once used for this ceremony, have fallen out of fashion.- Helen L. Roberts, The Cyclopaedia of Social Usage: Manners and Customs of the Twentieth Century
- I shall speak of ghost [revenant], of flame, and of ashes.- Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question
- Dressed in pink-and-blue pyjamas, satisfied within the confines of his own bedroom, Xavier de Maistre was gently nudging us to try, before taking off for distant hemispheres, to notice what we have already seen.- Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel
- I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.- Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths
- Say the magic word and the duck will come down and pay you $100.- Karl Marx, qtd. by Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminoids: Secret Societies & Political Paranoia
- That's why they always put two blank pages at the back of the atlas. They're for new countries. You're meant to fill them in yourself.- Roald Dahl, qtd. by Katharine Harmon, You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination
- The random picture or phrase might even be the more useful bit of information picked up at the brief visit--a thought to hold and later to share, a small spark to brighten our daily routine.- John M. Carrera, Pictorial Webster's: A Visual Dictionary of Curiosities
- But, should the play/Prove piercing earnest,/...Would not the fun/Look too expensive!/Would not the jest/Have crawled too far!- Emily Dickinson, qtd. in Martin Gardner, The Annotated Snark: Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark
- Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.- Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory
- With no possible response, be it spectral or not, short of or beyond a suppression, on the other edge of repression, originary or secondary, without a name, without the least symptom, and without even an ash.- Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression
- The evolution of life has only one discernible goal, and that is life itself.- Theodosius Dobzhansky, Genetics and the Origin of Species
- I want you to be madly loved.- André Breton, Mad Love
- He wrested the world's whereabouts from the stars, and locked the secret in a pocket watch.- Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
- In such a world only miracles or revelation could reform our cosmology.- Paul Feyerabend, Against Method
- History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.- Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
- Ein Sprachspiel: Darüber berichten, ob ein bestimmter Körper heller oder dunkler als ein andrer sei.- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour
- From a distance only the light is visible, a speeding gleaming horizontal angel, trumpet out on a hard bend.- Jeanette Winterson, Art & Lies
- nobody knows aslant / Style in one stray sitting I / approach sometime in plain / handmade rag wove costume / awry what I long for array- Susan Howe, The Midnight
- Once you've looked through the vanisher, it's never the same.- David and Ruth Ellwand, The Mystery of the Fool and the Vanisher
- Earnest utopians are late saints: sad, sweet martyrs.- J.C. Hallman, In Utopia: Six Kinds of Eden and the Search for a Better Paradise
- My sickness is underlining important things; all these underlined sentences begin with the destruction of these sentences.- Eds. Aaron Levy and Thaddeus Squire, The Revolt of the Bees: Wherein the Future of the Paper-Hive is Declared
- We are not drawn to dead bodies... You remain in flux, never congealing or solidifying. What will make that current flow into words?- Charles Barber, Sharon Kivland, Conrad Leyser, Reading the Glass: Management of the Eyes Moderation of the Gaze
- I say no more and walk barefoot.- Jean Genet, Miracle of the Rose
- Capitoline, Quirinal, Viminal, Esquiline, Caelian, Aventine, Palatine- Susan Stewart, The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics
- through this earth and I long to tell you, you who are earth too, and listen as we speak to each other of what we know: the light is in us.- Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her
- Our general picture of the creation of the world suggests that the earth evolved from a flaming gaseous mass which contracted and cooled.- Ira Wallach, Hopalong-Freud Rides Again
- One impulse from a vernal wood / May teach you more than man / Of moral evil and of good / Than all the sages can.- Wordsworth, qtd. in Bonnie J. Gisel, Nature's Beloved Son: Rediscovering John Muir's Botanical Legacy
- Everything is burning, / and if it is not burning / it will be soon.- Andy Young, All Fires the Fire
- Having experienced inner grace, he will be able to reveal it, and the patterns of eternal truths will flow forth to become the archetypical forms of his physical institutions and laws.- Manly P. Hall, Invisible Records of Thought & Action: A Practical Guide to Subtle Vibrations, Their Causes & Effects
- Sterne peitschten seinen Blick: / Trat ihr Dorn in sein Geschick [The stars whipped at his gaze: / have thorns entered his ways]. - Trans. John Felstiner, Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan
- Sterne peitschten seinen Blick: / Trat ihr Dorn in sein Geschick [The stars whipped at his gaze: / have thorns entered his ways]. - Trans. John Felstiner, Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan
- Among the most intriguing things about myths is the air they have of being more permanent than life. - Else-Brita Titchenell, The Masks of Odin: Wisdom of the Ancient Norse
- The ornamental devices set between the chapter-sections … are medieval alchemical symbols for gold in its various stages and forms. - ed. by Jolande Jacobi, Paracelsus: Selected Writings
- It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between. - Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses
- What is the simplest—the absolute minimum—that can be said about seeing? That the eye opens and the light comes in. - James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing
- No one watching this woman smear her initials in the steam of her water glass with her first finger, or slip cellophane packets of oyster crackers into her handbag for the sea gulls, could know her thoughts are thronged by our absence, or know how she does not watch, does not listen, does not wait, does not hope, and always for me and Sylvie. - Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
- ‘The arts require witnesses,’ Marmontel once said. - Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine
- The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life. - John Berger, About Looking
- Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face. - Jorge Luis Borges, A Personal Anthology
- Letting the parade pass from sight, he focuses on the empty road beyond, a pale curve vanishing into the woods where nothing moves and a street lamp flickers on and off until at last it flickers out and darkness sweeps in like a hand. - Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
- Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. - John Berger, Ways of Seeing
- You say to the boy open your eyes / When he opens his eyes and sees the light / You make him cry out. Saying / O Blue come forth / O Blue arise - Derek Jarman, Blue: Das Buch zum Film
- I once had a beautiful book with a shiny red vinyl cover. The book’s title I cannot remember. - Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories
- If one says “Red” (the name of a color) / and there are 50 people listening,/ it can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds. - Josef Albers, Interaction of Color
- Foreigner: a choked up rage deep down in my throat, a black angel clouding transparency, opaque, unfathomable spur. - Julia Kristeva, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, Strangers to Ourselves
- Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across thousands of miles and all the years we have lived. - Helen Keller, qtd. by Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses
- I grew up with the peach. It had a thin skin touched with fuzz, and a soft matte off-white color alternating with rosy hues. - C. Nadia Seremetakis, “The Memory of the Senses, Part I: Marks of the Transitory,” in The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity
- The optical arts spring from the eye and solely from the eye. - Jules Laforgue, “Impressionism,” qtd. by Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious
- There has never been conceived or made by man any instrument, machine, or contrivance, capable of such a diversity of usefulness as the human hand. - William G. Benham, The Laws of Scientific Hand Reading: A Practical Treatise on the Art Commonly Called Palmistry
- The sites of aesthetic discovery are as varied as our passions and our fears. - Allen S. Weiss, Shattered Forms
- I sense that humans have an urge to map - and that this mapping instinct, like our opposable thumbs, is part of what makes us human. - Katherine Harmon, You Are Here
- ...the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend. - Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
- Place can be difficult to locate. One might think that one can spot it somewhere, some way off in the distance, perhaps... - Tacita Dean and Jeremy Millar, Place
- - each sign as a postcard from the land of the dead, and on the other side, the longing mark that is the proper name. - Susan Stewart, On Longing
- THE GIFT, AND ESPECIALLY THE OBLIGATION TO RETURN TO IT - Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies
- I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. - Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
- Yes. They were all right. They knew where they were going, smiling at death in the shade of a ghost-gum. - Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines
- It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel. - Roland Barthes, Barthes by Barthes
- In Alice Springs - a grid of scorching streets where men in long white socks were forever getting in and out of Land Cruisers - I met a... - Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines
- Wer die Flügel des Altars / der Pfarrkirche von Lindenhardt / zumacht und die geschnitzten Figuren / in ihrem Gehäuse verschlieβt, / dem... - W. G. Sebald, Nach Der Natur
- Boys of harsh discipline, nameless actors, chained and brilliant, from the grand musical that will always occupy the mental theatre... - Andre Breton, Mad Love
- Un jour, il y a bien longtemps, je tombai sur une photographie du dernier frère de Napoléon, Jérôme (1852). - Rolande Barthes, La Chambre Claire
- Who am I? - Andre Breton, Nadja
jan 25 2011 ∞
mar 6 2013 +