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"The best works of art are never innocuous: they alter the viewer's perceptual predictions. It is only when the patterns of our vision are disrupted that we truly pay attention and must ask ourselves what we are looking at."
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"A goatee is to beards what diamonds are to ornaments."
"It does not much matter that an individual loses two or three hundred pounds in buying a bad picture, but it is to be regretted that a nation should lose two or three hundred thousand in raising a ridiculous building."
"A slight deviation form what we would think of as symmetry gives us a bit more information and the mind seems to enjoy this stimulation because it is always looking for value. Beauty is a slight deviation from expectation."
"Everyone wants a little bit of something beautiful."
"Works of art are infinitely solitary and nothing is less likely to reach them than criticism. Only love can grasp them and hold them and do them justice."
"In an animal's or a plant's expression of imagination (let's leave out the rest for now, so we don't have to deal with the question of consciousness in, for example, minerals), there is always purity in the connection between need and evolution. That which is created is a response to reality and very specific, essential concerns. This then is the origin of the union between what is so and mysterious harmony-truth and beauty. The bridge between them is inspired intuition and the actions it causes. Or, imagination causes inspiration causes intuition causes beauty, which then causes imagination again."
"The best works of art are never innocuous: they alter the viewer's perceptual predictions. It is only when the patterns of our vision are disrupted that we truly pay attention and must ask ourselves what we are looking at."
"It was the sort of beauty you feel so deeply it becomes contagious and somehow makes you feel beautiful too."
"était tard ; ainsi qu’une médaille neuve
La pleine lune s’étalait,
Et la solennité de la nuit, comme un fleuve
Sur Paris dormant ruisselait."
"Beauty without grace is like a fish far displaced from the water and looking at this kind of beauty is like watching that fish die right there on the cement in front of you."
Explore more quotes by Siri Hustvedt
"Correlation is not cause, it is just a 'music of chance'."
"But all attractions are alike,' he said. 'They come from an emptiness inside.' He hammered on this chest with his index finger. 'Something's missing and you have to fill it. Books, paintings, people, they're all the same...''A lot of people do without books and paintings.''True,' he said, 'but that doesn't affect the argument.' Paris turned his head to one side and chewed on his lip. 'Of course, nothing ever does the trick. Nobody's really satisfied for long."
"Creativity has always depended on openness and flexibility, so let us hope for more of both in the future."
"There is no perception without memory. But good art surprise us. Good art reorients our expectations, forces us to break the pattern, to see in a new way."
"Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded."
"If something's not working, it's wonderful to have a reader you can trust to say, 'Actually, you've gone off the deep end here'."
"Old places fire the internal weather of our pasts. The mild winds, aching calms, and hard storms of forgotten emotions return to us when we return to the spots where they happened."
"The stories and pictures I make for the lives of the people closest to me are the forms of my empathy."
"The truth is that what fascinates me is not so much being in a place as not being there: how places live in the mind once you have left them, how they are imagined before you arrive, or how they are seemingly called out of nothing to illustrate a thought or story like my tree down yonder. These mental spaces map our Innes lives more fully than any "real" map, delineating the borders of here and there that also shape what we see in the present."
"It appears that time has turned that young woman, who imagined herself a romantic heroine, into something of a comic character, but I remain fond of her. We are relatives, after all."
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