The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world.
Hermann Hesse, Demian, 1919
In the tragedy in question, for example, he condemned the ideas but admired the style, abhorred the conception but praised all the details, found the characters impossible but their speeches marvelous.
Gustave Flaubert, Pt. II, Ch. III, Madame Bovary, 1857
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, Translation by Richard Howard, 1978
The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes.
Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977
One may dream of a culture where everyone bursts into laughter when someone says: this is true, this is real.
Jean Baudrillard, Radical Thought, trans. Francois Debrix, 1994
You see, I have made a great discovery. I no longer believe in anything. Objects don’t exist for me except in so far as a rapport exists between them or between them and myself. When one attains this harmony, one reaches a sort of intellectual non-existence — what I can only describe as a sense of peace, which makes everything possible and right. Life then becomes a perpetual revelation. That is true poetry.
Georges Braque, The Power of Mystery, a London Observer interview with John Richardson, as quoted in Braque: The Late Works, 1997, by John Golding
O memory, where is now my youth,
Who used to say that life was truth?
Thomas Hardy, from: “I Have Lived With Shades”
Always the general show of things
Floats in review before my mind,
And such true love and reverence brings,
That sometimes I forget that I am blind.
Henry David Thoreau, from: “Inspiration”
Multitude, solitude: identical terms, and interchangeable by the active and fertile poet. The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd.
Charles Baudelaire, from: “Crowds”
