--Mikal Gilmore, Shot In The Heart
But if the stranger was an angel, the angel lied.
--Mikal Gilmore, Shot In The Heart Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson Years from now, when all the junk they got is broken and long forgotten, you'll still have your stars.
--Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.
--Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, Or The Evening Redness In The West He read with demonic speed, consuming books at a breakneck pace that hardly let up until the day he died.
--Steven Naifeh, Van Gogh: The Life Sept 21.
I would really like you to see a picture of that sculpture “Ecstasy of St. Therese.” I believe the sculptor is Bernini. I’ve never seen any great works of art in person but I guess I’m familiar with most European Art through books I’ve studied. I once saw a picture of Christ by a Russian artist that really haunted me for a long time. Christ didn’t look anything like the popular beaming Western Christian version of the kindly shepherd we’re used to. He looked like a man, with a gaunt, lean, sort of haunted face with deep set large dark eyes. You could tell he was pretty tall, angular, rangy, a man alone and I guess that was the most striking thing about the picture. No halo, no radiant beam from heaven above. Just this extraordinary man— this ordinary human being who made himself extra-ordinary and tried to tell us all that it was nothing more than any of us could do. Loneliness and a hint of doubt seemed to fill the picture. I would like to have known the man in that picture. --Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song His stories and plays--even the darkest among them--are hymns of praise. Flowers and lightning and wind and sun and all the objects of the visible world appear...
--Janet Malcolm, Reading Chekhov Why are we worn out? Why do we, who start out so passionate, brave, noble, believing, become totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirty-five? Why is it that one is extinguished by consumption, another puts a bullet in his head, a third seeks oblivion in vodka, cards, a fourth, in order to stifle fear and anguish, cynically tramples underfoot the portrait of his pure, beautiful youth? Why is it that, once fallen, we do not try to rise, and, having lost one thing, we do not seek another?
--Anton Chekhov, The Complete Short Novels For him, writing never lost that pure, calligraphic joy.
--Steven Naifeh, Van Gogh: The Life Vincent was the product of his own fanatic heart.
--Steven Naifeh, Van Gogh: The Life |
Alissa B.Nothing commonplace about The Common Place. Archives
December 2023
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