Hannah Yoest > Hannah's Quotes

“Love is the skillful audacity required to share an inner life”
― Gertrude Stein

“If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the Church triumphant would have no symphony, it would be played like an orchestra in which all instruments played the same note.”
― c.s. lewis

“How many out-of-character things did I need to do, I wondered, before the world rearranged itself around me?”
― Ben Lerner, 10:04

“You are so afraid of losing your moral sense that you are not willing to take it through anything more dangerous than a mud-puddle. ”
― Gertrude Stein

“Sunrise paints the sky with pinks and the sunset with peaches. Cool to warm. So is the progression from childhood to old age.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“I dreamt that my hair was kempt. Then I dreamt that my true love unkempt it.”
― Ogden Nash

“Minority art, vernacular art, is marginal art. Only on the margins does growth occur.”
― Joanna Russ

“Women love with their ears, men with their eyes.”
― Sunday Adelaja

“I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.”
― Georgia O'Keefe

“Well-read people are less likely to be evil.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Slippery Slope

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“The only way to overcome sadness is to consume it. ”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

“If Music is a Place -- then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.”
― Vera Nazarian

“War is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of.”
― Sebastian Junger, War

“They say Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I have never led an army, I am a wanderer. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer’s 'Odyssey' as if it were the sweet body of a woman.”
― Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy

“We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“The reader must come armed , in a serious state of intellectual readiness. This is not easy because he comes to the text alone. In reading, one's responses are isolated, one'sintellect thrown back on its own resourses. To be confronted by the cold abstractions of printed sentences is to look upon language bare, without the assistance of either beauty or community. Thus, reading is by its nature a serious business. It is also, of course, an essentially rational activity.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Sex and art are the same thing.”
― Pablo Picasso

“The fact that for a long time Cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it means nothing. I do not read English, an English book is a blank book to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist. Why should I blame anyone but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about?”
― Pablo Picasso

“Art is not chaste. Those ill prepared should be allowed no contact with art. Art is dangerous. If it is chaste, it is not art.”
― Pablo Picasso

“An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought”
― Pablo Picasso

“Art is a lie that reveals the truth.”
― Pablo Picasso

“There is no such thing as repetition. Only insistance. ”
― Gertrude Stein

“You attract what you need like a lover”
― Gertrude Stein

“Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?”
― Gertrude Stein

“In the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling.”
― Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

“It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.”
― Gertrude Stein