Photos have no narrative content. They only describe light on surface.
Garry Winogrand
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
A disenchantment falsified and blunted my usual feelings and joys: the garden lacked fragrance, the woods held no attraction for me, the world stood around me like a clearance sale of last year’s secondhand goods, insipid, all its charm gone. Books were so much paper, music a grating noise. That is the way leaves fall around a tree in autumn, a tree unaware of the rain running down its sides, of the sun or the frost, and of life gradually retreating inward. The tree does not die. It waits.
Hermann Hesse, Demian, 1919
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
Was something brushed across my mind
That no one on earth will ever find?
Robert Lee Frost, From “A Passing Glimpse”
Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:
silence of paintings. You language where all language
ends.
Rainer Maria Rilke, From “To Music”, Translated by Stephen Mitchell
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
What do you consider most humane?—To spare someone shame.
Friedrich Nietzsche, from: “The Gay Science”, 1882
The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.
Mark Twain, Letter to George Bainton, 15 October 1888 (thanks
doegewooniets)
But do you understand, I cry to him, do you understand that along with happiness, in the exact same way and in perfectly equal proportion, man also needs unhappiness!
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Possessed, 1872
