Jay

“It is easy to see all that art can lose from such a constant obligation. Ease, to begin with, and that divine liberty so apparent in the work of Mozart. It is easier to understand why our works of art have a drawn, set look and why they collapse so suddenly. It is obvious why we have more journalists than creative writers, more boy scouts of painting than Cézannes, and why sentimental tales or detective novels have taken the place of War and Peace or The Charterhouse of Parma. Of course, one can always meet that state of things
with a humanistic lamentation and become what Stepan Trofimovich in The Possessed insists upon being; a living reproach. One can also have, like him, attacks of patriotic melancholy. But such melancholy in no way changes reality. It is better, in my opinion, to give the era its due, since it demands this so vigorously, and calmly admit that the period of the revered master, of the artist with a camellia in his buttonhole, of the armchair genius is over.”
― Albert Camus, Create Dangerously

“If the yumens are men, they are men unfit or untaught to dream and to act as men.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest

“There is no greater torture in this world than to carry about in one's soul night and day an evil thought which harasses and pursues, and be unable to tell it to anybody.”
― Mór Jókai, Eyes Like the Sea

“We have thought of peace as the passive and war as the active way of living. The opposite is true. War is not the most strenuous life. It is a kind of rest-cure compared to the task of reconciling our differences.”
― Mary Parker Follett