the holy art of “giving for Jesus’ sake” ought to be much more strongly developed among us Christians. Never forget that all state relief for the poor is a blot on the honor of your savior. The fact that the government needs a safety net to cat...
In 1857, Bizet departed for Rome and spent three years there. He studied the landscape, the culture, Italian literature and art. Musically he studied the scores of the great masters. At the end of the first year he was asked to submit a religious wor...
Choreographer Twyla Tharp, who directed the opera and dance scenes for the film Amadeus, has this to say about the film’s portrait of Mozart: There are no ‘natural’ geniuses… No-one worked harder than Mozart. By the time he was twenty-eight y...
We live by revelation, as Christians, as artists, which means we must be careful never to get set into rigid molds. The minute we begin to think we know all the answers, we forget the questions, and we become smug like the Pharisee who listed all his...
Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our abi...
Signs imply ways of living, possibilities of existence, they are the symptoms of an overflowing (jaillissante) or exhausted (épuisée) life. But an artist cannot be content with an exhausted life, nor with a personal life. One does not write with on...
And after the briefest flowering of understanding, my own generation had grown complacent. At some level, we must have started taking it for granted that the way the universe worked was now obvious to any child ... even though it went against everyth...
Pseudoscience often relies on a witches' brew of scientific terms (e.g. "wavelength," "energy fields," "vibrations") half-baked into simplistic metaphors that do not correspond with testable reality. In some cases, pseudoscience simply relies on lang...
There is talk of a new astrologer [Nicolaus Copernicus] who wants to prove that the earth moves and goes around instead of the sky, the sun, the moon, just as if somebody were moving in a carriage or ship might hold that he was sitting still and at r...
Je voudrais te rejoindre dans l'idéal d'un art simple, accessible, qui charme d'abord, bouleverse ensuite. Comme toi, je crois que la science, le métier, l'érudition, la virtuosité technique doivent disparaître sous l'apparence d'un naturel aima...
. . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, an...
I want you to know that life will try to crack you like an egg and your silence will eventually break. Someday you will spill some of those painful secrets and taste a modicum of much-needed freedom. You will lose a great deal as a result but the gai...
It is believed that the critics are the men who have failed in literature and art. It is so in social life, too. Without any egoistic interest nobody criticizes the government. Give the critics the money and the power, more than they have, they will ...
Hunter was bipolar, for crying out loud. He had checked into the nut house on more than one occasion and, honestly, I was already starting to feel the anxiety of living together. I would need to get my martial arts skills up to par to deal with this ...
Edward D. Wood, Jr.: And cut! Print. We're moving on. That was perfect. Ed Reynolds: Perfect? Mr. Wood, do you know anything about the art of film production? Edward D. Wood, Jr.: Well, I like to think so. Ed Reynolds: That cardboard headstone tipped...
John Oldman: I suspect I saw the British Isles from what is now the French coast. Huge mountains on the other side of an enormous deep valley that was shadowed by the setting sun. This was before they were separated from the continent by the rising s...
Harry: [insistent] *You* are creating the mystery here obviously y'have something you'd like to say. Say it. John Oldman: [Hesitant] Maybe... I... Harry: [sing-song] Ten, nine, eight, seven, si... Sandy: [Chiding] Harry, stop. John Oldman: There is s...
Arthur Bannister: [on the movie screen, "The Lady from Shanghai" is playing] I'm aiming at you, lover. Mrs. Dalton: I'm aiming at you, lover. Arthur Bannister: Of course, killing you is killing myself. Mrs. Dalton: Of course, killing you is killing m...
Marjane as a teenager: You say that our scarfs and trousers are indecent and that we put on make up, etc. As an art student, I'm often in the studio. I need to move freely in order to draw. A longer scarf will hinder me. As for our trousers, you say ...
And now I feel like crying, because I really do not understand, and I don't think I will when I'm older either. It was only when I loved Franz I understood the world, and felt happy. When you love, you're praying. Everything was quite clear. I wanted...
Edges I am a child throwing rocks into the stream. Challenging the rushing water. Raising my fist and daring fate to do it worst. I am a dancer in the waves of the ocean. Swaying in time with the tide. Pirouetting, the current my only friend. I am th...
