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"Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us."
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"The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means."

"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."

"Freedom and fullness of expression are of the essence of the art."

"And it seemed at last that there were two musics progressing at one time before the seat of IlAovatar, and they were utterly at variance. The one was deep and wide ad beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow from which its beauty chiefly came."

"Most critics, fond of subservient artstill make the whole depend upon a part.They talk of principles, but notions prizeAnd all to one loved folly sacrifice."

"One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin."

"Art and the artist meet in stages, slowly revealing themselves until both are satisfied with what the other has become."

"A picture is a voiceless poem, a poem is a vocal picture."

"It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around."
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"That is what I'm looking forward to the most, practical learning. I want to be a registered nurse so getting to talk to people who already work in those jobs can really teach me what to expect when I get out in the real world."

"I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates."

"Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms."

"Strangers used to gather together at the cinema and sit together in the dark, like Ancient Greeks participating in the mysteries, dreaming the same dream in unison."

"My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for magic realism, she once told me she had been to the doctor's on the very day."

"Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place."

"Anxiety is the beginning of conscience, which is the parent of the soul but is not compatible with innocence."

"Aeneas carried his aged father on his back from the ruins of Troy and so do we all, whether we like it or not, perhaps even if we have never known them."

"Nostalgia, the vice of the aged. We watch so many old movies our memories come in monochrome."
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