James Elkins > Quotes

“In my living room there are two large bookcases, each one eight feet tall, and they have about five hundred books between them. If I step up to a shelf and look at the books one by one, I can remember something about each. As a historian once said, some stare at me reproachfully, grumbling that I have never read them. One may remind me vaguely of a time when I was interested in romantic novels. An old college text will elicit a pang of unhappiness about studying. Each book has its character, and even books I know very well also have this kind of wordless flavor. Now if I step back from the shelf and look quickly across both bookcases I speed up that same process a hundredfold. Impressions wash across my awareness. But each book still looks back in its own way, answering the rude brevity of my gaze, calling faintly to me out of the corner of my eye. At that speed many books remain wrapped in the shadows of my awareness--I know I have looked past them and I know they are there, but I refuse to call them to mind.”
― James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing – How Sight Alters the Seen and Transforms the Seer

“Seeing is metamorphosis, not mechanism.”
― James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing – How Sight Alters the Seen and Transforms the Seer

“A picture will leave me unmoved if I don't take time with it, but if I stop, and let myself get a little lost, there's no telling what might happen”
― James Elkins, Pictures and Tears

“Sleep is the ideal state. Everything else is illness.”
― James Elkins, Weak in Comparison to Dreams

“On I drove, vaguely in the direction of nowhere in particular.”
― James Elkins, Weak in Comparison to Dreams

“Plaster and paint make us think we’re cultured, but we all sleep in dusty boxes with bars all around and perforated holes for ventilation.”
― James Elkins, Weak in Comparison to Dreams

“Plenty of people sleepwalk through life. It’s nothing remarkable. People like us don’t get up in our pajamas and walk around in the middle of the night. We are always in pajamas. We are asleep all day. We are in pajamas at work. We’re in pajamas when we’re getting married. We’re in pajamas when we’re walking around a freezing island in Helsinki. We are the incurable, unwakeable somnambulists, sleepwalkers for life. People like to say life is a dream, and it can be if you make it that way by lying.”
― James Elkins, Weak in Comparison to Dreams

“If your life has gone so far from reason and come so close to a nightmare,
then it won’t help to try to make it normal, that will only make it worse.”
― James Elkins, Weak in Comparison to Dreams

“Sleep is the best, the sleep of dreams, Liz said, quoting someone.”
― James Elkins, Weak in Comparison to Dreams

“Lying is like dreaming, I thought. There needs to be just enough truth to keep the dreamer asleep, to make it all seem plausible. While you’re dreaming, the part of you that’s making up the dream is back there somewhere, inventing things, improvising, trying not to mess up.”
― James Elkins, Weak in Comparison to Dreams

“My favourite letter, of all the ones I have received.

"Hello.

I cried in a museum in front of a Gaugin painting - because somehow he had managed to paint a transparent pink dress. I could almost see the dress wafting in the hot breeze.

I cried at the Louvre in front of Victory. She had no arms, but she was so tall.

I cried (so hard I had to leave) at a little concern where a young man played solo cello Bach suites. It was in a weird little Methodist church and there were only about fifteen of us in the audience, the cellist alone on the stage. It was midday. I cried because (I guess) I was overcome with love. It was impossible for me to shake the sensation (mental, physical) that J.S. Bach was in the room with me, and I loved him.

These three instances (and the others I am now recollecting) I think have something to do with loneliness… a kind of craving for the company of beauty. Others, I suppose, might say God.

But this feels too simple a response.

Robin Parks”
― James Elkins, Pictures and Tears

“A picture can be taken so quickly, and reproductions of it can be so accurate, that it can be impossible not to see it again and again over the years. After a while, the effect is numbing. I have seen the original Ecstasy of St. Francis many times, and I've also seen it projected in classrooms, in books, and even on postcards. With more popular paintings, the situation is even worse. Paintings like Munch's The Scream and Leonardo's Mona Lisa have been effectively ruined for me. Not only have I forgotten my first encounters with them, which were sometimes intense, but I have almost forgotten that they mean anything”
― James Elkins, Pictures and Tears

“Plenty of people sleepwalk through life. It’s nothing remarkable.”
― James Elkins, Weak in Comparison to Dreams

“I hadn’t known I was moving in a loop, but that’s how paths are. You don’t always pay attention.”
― James Elkins, Weak in Comparison to Dreams

“I am going to be careful not to make too much sense”
― James Elkins, Pictures and Tears

“It is also possible the dingo thought it was a hyena or wanted to be accepted as one.”
― James Elkins, Weak in Comparison to Dreams

“We live by stepping around obstacles, I concluded, as I stepped gingerly down the slope to avoid the spreading fire.”
― James Elkins, Weak in Comparison to Dreams

“It was one
of those days where you pull on your clothes without thinking, because
you’ve done it tens of thousands of times before, except that you take off
your socks as soon as you put them on, and then you have to put them on
again, and then you take them off, because you can’t decide. It might be a
long day at the zoo, and eventually all of a sudden there you are, dressed,
but the thing that sticks up out of the collar and looks back at you can’t
possibly be you, because it’s a mess. It’s older than it should be. It’s even
got wrinkles. Its eyes are glassy and indistinct and seem to belong to some
animal that has no expression, like an iguana or an octopus, where the eyes
just sit there like buttons, or like a whale, where the great barnacled mass of
the body would be just another rocky outcropping except that there, right in
the middle of the scars and fissures, there’s an eye, which looks out of that
mass, unmistakably looks right back at you, proving something intelligent’s
in there, a mind is trapped inside that mountainside of scar and blubber. The
eye looks at you and wonders about something.”
― James Elkins, Weak in Comparison to Dreams