[Longer introduction to "The Nutcracker Suite"] Narrator: You know, it's funny how wrong an artist can be about his own work. The one composition of Tchaikovsky's that he really detested was his "Nutcracker Suite", which is probably the most popular ...
Jerry Lundegaard: You see, my wife's dad is real well off. Carl Showalter: So, why don't you just ask him for the money? Gaear Grimsrud: Or your fucking wife, you know. Carl Showalter: Or your fuckin' wife, Jerry? Jerry Lundegaard: Well, it's all par...
[first lines] Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is found in death. Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one's body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears, and s...
Tony Stark: [recording a log as he tests his rocket boots] Day 11, Test 37, Configuration 2.0. For lack of a better option, Dummy is still on fire safety. [turns to robot] Tony Stark: If you douse me again, and I'm not on fire, I'm donating you to a ...
Jeanine Pettibone: [following the disastrous Stonehenge performance] If it got solved, that would be alright, but it doesn't get solved. I mean what do you think happened out there? What got solved tonight? Ian Faith: For one thing that goes wrong......
[Mozart loses at musical chairs] Emanuel Schikaneder: Herr Mozart, why don't you name your son's penalty? Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Yes, Papa. Name it. Name it, I'll do anything you say. Anything. Leopold Mozart: I want you to come back to Salzburg wi...
[Bruce is refusing to demonstrate his commitment to justice by executing a criminal] Ra's Al Ghul: You cannot lead these men unless you are prepared to do what is necessary to defeat evil. Bruce Wayne: And where would I be leading these men? Ra's Al ...
Asking where memory is "located" in the brain is like asking where running is located in the body. There are certainly parts of the body that are more important (the legs) or less important (the little fingers) in performing the task of running but, ...
The pattern of your breathing affects the pattern of your performance. When you are under stress, deep breathing helps bring your mind and body back into the present.Over the years I have handed out thousands of little stickers to athletes that read ...
As I sit here on a snowy morning watching the flakes gently fall outside my window, I look at the 300-year-old building across the street and the beautifully carved angels on its facade. There was a time people would create, just to give something be...
Teaching is a sacred art. This is why the noblest druid is not the one who conjures fires and smoke but the one who brings the news and passes on the histories. The teacher, the bard, the singer of tales is a freer of men's minds and bodies, especial...
You've sinned, I suppose, but your punishment has been out of all proportion. They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capabl...
Very early on, near the beginning of my writing life, I came to believe that I had to seize on some object outside of literature. Writing as a sylistic exercise seemed barren to me. Poetry as the art of the word made me yawn. I also understood that I...
Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail noth...
The proper stuff of fiction” does not exist everything is the proper stuff of fiction every feeling every thought every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon no perception comes amiss. And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and sta...
Ares always reemerges from the chaos. It will never go away. Athenian civilization defends itself from the forces of Ares with metis, or technology. Technology is built on science. Science is like the alchemists' uroburos, continually eating its own ...
We know from accounts of Rilke's life that his stay in Rodin's workshops taught him how modern sculpture had advanced to the genre of the autonomous torso. The poet's view of the mutilated body thus has nothing to do with the previous century's Roman...
You say great artists sell their souls for their art?" "Maybe," she ventured. "That's true, I suppose. If you're doing it right, anyway. I've probably sold mine. Jack's certainly sold his. And you, I imagine." "I have not!" she said, anger showing cl...
What is vital and healthy does not necessarily survive... An art, a whole civilization, may at any time slip through men's fingers in a very few years and be gone beyond recovery. If we are alive when such a thing is happening we shall hardly notice ...
The canvas isn’t empty. It’s full of whatever you imagine it to be full of. My art is so conceptual that not only do I not tell, but I don’t even show. All I do is sign the canvas and try to sell it.
When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of a...