As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.
To never aspire to excellence means to never fully comprehend the amount of work required to achieve it.
I mean, that is a mop of real hair. He has hair like a 15-year-old. . . and so, I have to acknowledge I am a little envious of his hair.
An old woman I loved very much when I was young - the wife of Jean Villard - she's just reciting poetry all the time, which is beautiful because it means she went back to the world of poetry that she loved when she was young. That's all she does - she almost doesn't recognize her children, but she recites Valéry and Baudelaire. So what? We're the ones who are suffering. She's not.
Louise, I would gladly fire the past for you, go and not look back. I have been reckless before, never counting the cost, oblivious to the cost. Now, I've done the sums ahead. I know what it will mean to redeem myself from the accumulations of a lifetime. I know and I don't care. You set before me a space uncluttered by association. It might be a void or it might be a release. Certainly I want to take the risk. I want to take the risk because the life I have stored up is going mouldy.
I mean, the shoe - there is a music to it, there is attitude, there is sound, it's a movement.
I am glad so many women singers are being heard in music today. It is healthy for music. . . healthy because it means a lot of men are listening!
The inspectors also found Iraq had developed effective means for dispersing these materials: unmanned aerial vehicles, spray devices, special munitions. We don't know where any of it is. And the last 60 days of new inspections have turned up no additional information that could allay any concerns about this military capability.
There's another piece of legislation in Russia that would make "allowing for nontraditional sexual relations" a cause for removing parental rights, and remove children from same-sex families altogether. It was withdrawn, most likely temporarily, under international pressure. What "allowing for nontraditional sexual relations" means, nobody knows. And this is part of the point of all of these laws. They have to be vague to not just enable but require selective enforcement.
Vladimir Putin is really very much of a leader. I mean, you can say, oh, isn't that a terrible thing - the man has very strong control over a country.
liberty, which means resisting all forms of cultural authoritarianism, be it from the right wing church, black ideologues, black nationalists, or mainstream white media. We have to accent liberty and freedom of expression and thought in all their forms.
Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
Nourishing spirituality means cultivating the inward space, the basis of which all things can be brought together. It means overwhelming deadness and stagnation and living reality in terms of values, inspiration, and symbols of higher meaning.
When you think about Balenciaga muse and model Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon - I mean, you look at their mother Jane Birkin, and what they have grown up to be. . . They aren't invaded in fashion, and yet they love it. I mean, who is going to schlep these big skirts and trains and all these things? How wonderful it is to see the young in miniskirts!
This morning I understand what it means to die: when we disappear, it is the others who die for us, for here I am, lying on a cold pavement and it is not the dying I care about; it has no more meaning this morning that it did yesterday. But never again will I see those I love, and if that is what dying is about then it really is the tragedy they say it is.
As far as I'm concerned, love means fighting, big fat lies, and a couple of slaps across the face.
'Conservation' (the conservation law) means this. . . that there is a number, which you can calculate, at one moment-and as nature undergoes its multitude of changes, this number doesn't change. That is, if you calculate again, this quantity, it'll be the same as it was before. An example is the conservation of energy: there's a quantity that you can calculate according to a certain rule, and it comes out the same answer after, no matter what happens, happens.
Man's music is seen as a means of restoring the soul, as well as confused and discordant bodily afflictions, to the harmonic proportions that it shares with the world soul of the cosmos.
I think I need to spend some time with safari but what arrests my attention are salient, sadomasochism, saccadic, and salad days. I think I will go learn more about coral only to learn a lot more about corollary and counterturn and coffin nail. I go from magnificence to means to marquee to maniac to distyle, ductile, hindsight, shell game, veronica, yardstick, ball field, magpie, variegated, and close shave.
I mean, if you were to find a shattered mirror, find all the pieces, all the shards and all the tiny chips, and have whatever skill and patience it took to put all that broken glass back together so that it was complete once again, the restored mirror would still be spiderwebbed with cracks, it would still be a useless glued version of its former self, which could show only fragmented reflections of anyone looking into it. Some things are beyond repair. And that was me.
