- The way humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.
- Pumping herself in our faces, the murky blend of red and black light makes her look better than she really is. The red lights erase scars and bruises, zits, some kinds of tattoos, plus stretch and track marks. The black lights make her eyes and teeth glow bright white. It's funny how the beauty of art has so much more to do with the frame than with the artwork itself.
- "Oh, I can criticize and complain and judge everything, but what does that get me? Griping isn't the same as creating something. Rebelling isn't rebuilding. Ridiculing isn't replacing... We've taken the world apart, but we have no idea what to do with the pieces. My generation, all of our making fun of things isn't making the world any better. We've spent so much time judging what other people created that we've created very, very little of our own. I used rebellion as a way to hide out.. we use criticism as a fake participation."
- It's not a big deal, the way Dr. Marshall sees it. We do it every day. Kill the unborn to save the elderly. In the gold ash of the chapel, breathing her reasons into my ear, she asked, every time we burn a gallon of gas or an acre of rain forest, aren't we killing the future to preserve the present?
- Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and the glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained and understood.
- This is all the stuff the Mommy used to tell him. She used to say, "The only frontier you have left is the world of intangibles. Everything else is sewn up too tight." Caged inside too many laws. By intangibles, she meant the Internet, movies, music, stories, art, rumors, computer programs, anything that isn't real Virtual realities. Make-believe stuff. The culture. The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it's only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.
- "You know the old phrase 'Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it'? Well, I think those who remember their past are even worse off." "Those who remember the past ted to get the story really screwed up." "In my opinion, those who remember the past are paralyzed by it."
- Denny says, the longer we can keep building, the longer we can keep creating, the more will be possible. The longer we can tolerate being incomplete. Delay gratification. Consider the idea of Tantric Architecture.
- The way she stood with her shadow falling on the wall behind her for the last time, I started to trace her outline. And Paige Marshall said, "What's that for?" It's how art was invented. And I said, "Just in case. It's just in case you're not crazy."
dec 24 2014 ∞
dec 24 2014 +