Status Updates From Quote, Unquote

A poet who knows what it is he 'wants to say' may be sure it's been said already.
Hugh Kenner, from "A Sinking Island"

'Travaillons,' Cezanne would say, when visitors wanted to talk aesthetics.
Frederic Raphael

More and more I feel bent against the modern English habit of using poetry as a channel for thinking aloud, instead of making anything.
Matthew Arnold

To look is to forget the name of the things you are seeing.
Paul Valery

It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.
P. D. James from A Taste for Death

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
George Eliot

Get along, says our DNA, talk to each other, figure out the world, be useful, and above all keep an eye out for affection.
Lewis Thomas, M.D.

Sonny boy, it's all real — so watch out!
The Town Drunk of Tarboro, North Carolina

It is very difficult to stop feeling.
Raymond Moore

... it seems as if I’ve been doing the same things since I was six years old. I’m a few inches taller and I have a graying beard, but otherwise there’s not much difference.
Maurice Sendak

Few people have the imagination for reality.
Goethe

It’s nothing that a guy should take all of his emotions, his prayers and meditations into a night club, and torture the people with their torments by playing everything they feel. It would be better sometimes to play some things they imagine to be true, outside their own personal lives.
Charles Mingus

The peculiar grace of a Shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it.
Thomas Merton

I think I am beginning to understand something of it.
Renoir's last words

The food of the soul is Light and Space.
Herman Melville

I am that he whose brains are scattered endlessly.
William Carlos Williams