In the long run

Experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you.
Katherine Anne Porter

Understanding confusion

In Broken Images
by Robert Graves

He is quick, thinking in clear images;
I am slow, thinking in broken images.

He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;
I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images.

Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;
Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.

Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact;
Questioning their relevance, I question their fact.

When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;
when the fact fails me, I approve my senses.

He continues quick and dull in his clear images;
I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.

He in a new confusion of his understanding;
I in a new understanding of my confusion.

From a movie

Randomness is very difficult to achieve... organization always merges back if you don't pay attention.
Science des rêves (2006)

Friendship

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value;
rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
C. S. Lewis

Fragile

Un rêve intact est une merveille fragile.
A dream intact is a fragile marvel.
Edouard Estaunié

From a poem

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
...
Sylvia Plath (Mad Girl's Love Song)

The passage we did not take

Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage which we did not take,
towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden.
T. S. Eliot

Capture the moment

A sonnet is a moment's monument,
Memorial from the Soul's eternity
To one dead deathless hour.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti

(This quote came across my mind while i was looking at the beautiful photo on Luisa's blog, at her Cloud flying over the ocean.)

The madness of art

We work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
Henry James

Once you decide

Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

A day infected with a dream

A lost but happy dream may shed its light upon our waking hours, and the whole day may be infected with the gloom of a dreary or sorrowful one; yet of neither may we be able to recover a trace.
Walter de la Mare

Understanding poetry

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.
Carl Sandburg

I want to be all that I am capable of becoming.
Katherine Mansfield

A dream

La lune est le rêve du soleil.
The moon is a dream of sun.
Klee

The earth laughs in flowers.
E.E.Cummings

Persistent illusion

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
Albert Einstein

The element of surprise

Art must take reality by surprise.
Francoise Sagan

Jazz quote

If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.
Charlie Parker

Risk

Art is, from any point of view, the greatest of risks.
Jean Helion

A reminder

And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet
and the winds long to play with your hair.
Kahlil Gibran

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Billy Collins

Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be.
Anton Chekhov

A task

To extract beauty from one's own milieu is one of the most difficult tasks of art.
Theophile Gautier

The past

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
Edward Thomas

Green

I go for a walk in the forest of Fontainebleau. I get 'green' indigestion. I must get rid of this sensation into a picture. Green rules it. A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions.
Pablo Picasso

Poetry

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.
Vincent van Gogh

Art will never come except from some small disregarded corner where an isolated and inspired man is studying the mysteries of nature.
Jean-Francois Millet

Autumn's almost here

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
Albert Camus

A poem

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

Edna St.Vincent Millay

God takes care of imbeciles, little children and artists.
Camille Pissarro