AoiBerny

“There was no end to human desire.
The perfect life was an unattainable dream. The only way to really win was to say with your dying breath that you had truly enjoyed living.” - From Mahoutsukai no Yoru (Witch on the Holy Night)”
― Kinoko Nasu

“Any artist must sometimes be filled with an intense pleasure in his work, a sense of its radiant merit, a vision of it as excelling. This is not a matter of comparisons in any ordinary sense. Most artists pay little attention to their contemporaries. Those who nourish them belong to the past. Only the vulgar are anxious when hearing others praised. One's sense of one's own excellence is uninvidious, imprecise, probably healthy, perhaps essential. Equally important is that humility, that sense of unavoidable limitation, which the artist must also feel when he sees, huge behind his own puny effort, the glimmering shade of perfection.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Everyone had a choice. To lament the little time they had left, or to gamble on it? Perhaps we find things beautiful because they don’t last. Someday, this would all end…but not just yet." - From Mahoutsukai no Yoru (Witch on the Holy Night)”
― Kinoko Nasu

“There is a kind of despair involved in creation which I am sure any artist knows all about. In art, as in morality, great things go by the board because at the crucial moment we blink our eyes. When is the crucial moment? Greatness is to recognize it and be able to hold it and to extend it. But for most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter. And so we let each thing go, thinking vaguely that it will always be given to us to try again. Thus works of art, and thus whole lives of men, are spoilt by blinking and moving quickly on. I often found that I had ideas for stories, but by the time I had thought them out in detail they seemed to me hardly worth writing, as if I had already 'done' them: not because they were bad, but because they already belonged to the past and I had lost interest. My thoughts were soon stale to me. Some things I ruined by starting them too soon. Others by thinking them so intensely in my head that they were over before they began. Projects would change in a second from hazy uncommitted dreams into unsalvageable ancient history. Whole novels existed only in their titles.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince