Allen Levi > Quotes

“..But for anything to be good, truly good, there must be love in it. .. There must be love for the gift itself, love for the subject being depicted or the story being told, and love for the audience. Whether the art is sculpture, farming, teaching, lawmaking, medicine, music, or raising a child, if love is not in it - at the very heart of it - it might be skillful, marketable, or popular but I doubt it is truly good. Nothing is what it is supposed to be if love is not at the core.”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“...but he remained at the drawing of the woman, obedient to his conviction that it was better to see one thing well than many poorly.”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden: A Novel

“They agreed enthusiastically on the virtue of holding printed books over scrolling through digital ones. “Those damned devices are killing little dinosaurs like me,” Tony lamented.”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“One could almost hear the sound of stones dropping to the ground.”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“How is it, Theo wondered, that a piece of paper - a letter, a photo, a ticket stub, a sketch, a painting - is suddenly transformed by placing it in four bits of wood beneath a pane of glass? What does it mean that we place permanent boundaries around transient moments? What does it say of humankind that we take such trouble to freeze specific memories, that we devote such energy to capturing and preserving the "minute particulars" of our lives?”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“Well intentioned? Entirely.
Affectionate? Unquestionably.
Heartwarming? Perhaps.
Upsetting? Possibly.
Wise? Maybe not.
"Should I send it?" Theo removed the feather and tore up the card. Maybe next year.”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“She understood the difference between a "troubled mind" and "troublemaker”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“His soul caught its breath at the sight, like a swimmer coming up from the depths. For that moment he could separate beauty from his grief, and celebrate, if only ambivalently, that there was still a world of goodness apart from, or bigger than, his aching loneliness.
Above and behind the aerial ballet of bird flight, the clouds began to robe themselves in color, as if the sky too, was fighting for the heart of this wounded man. The slow, subtle changes, akin to tilting a cluster of opal beneath light, in which one tint dissolves into another, hinted that the great expanse overhead was alive, a thriving nest of angels of hope.
The sheer wonderment of the moment, the wings of fifty thousand birds, and the intoxicating surplus of beauty, overwhelmed him, as though a rope that had been pulled taut that tied him to the darkness of Tita’s death had snapped and fallen powerless to the ground.
Theo’s eyes filled with tears again - weariness? Hope? Forgiveness? Surrender? - as he laid his head back and looked into the open sky above him.
A single star caught his eye.
A tiny glimmer.
Searching from horizon to horizon, he confirmed that it was the first and only star in the sky.‘Looking back on that moment, he realized that in the time between the quarter hour before sunset and the star of dusk, somehow…this splintered soul had begun to heal. It would happen in fits and starts. It would be a healing that would never, at least in this life, be total or final. But it was the moment when the fever broke for him.
In every place that he ever lived after that, he insisted that his home be within walking distance of a river with a view to the west, and a bench…
And, on many days…he would check the exact time of sunset to ensure that he would be punctual for his date with a ten-year-old girl whose laughter was a murmuration and whose memory was a single star, the brightest in all the sky.”
― Allen Levi

“A gold leaf fell between them. Another late departure.”
― Allen Levi

“Sadness may be many things, but it is rarely stupid. The good sadness, I think, is always trying to tell us something very important.”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“He had the imagination of a poet. But he had, too, the eyes and mind of a connoisseur. Though he was easily interested in many things, he was keenly interested in a particular few.”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“My expertise in sadness is hard earned, but I realize more and more that it is a gift. Living with sadness, accepting it, is easier than trying to pretend it isn’t there. It is another of life’s great mysteries that sadness and joy can coexist so compatibly with one another. In fact, I wonder if on this side of heaven, neither one can be complete without the other.”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“Herbivores eat Brussel sprouts,
carnivores eat birds,
cashivores eat dollar bills,
and verbivores eat words.”
― Allen Levi

“Sadness might be many things, but it is rarely stupid.”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“This old man [Theo] will someday leave the world, knowing that, at least for one short season, he was an agent for good and that he used art not for his personal fame or advancement, but for its highest ends “to bestow… a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness, instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.”
― Allen Levi