Quotes About Inspiration

Wouldn't you rather make a sweater or a hat?" "That would ruin it. It would have to be perfect. I'd have to think and count stitches. This way if I make a mistake, it's all part of the beauty of it. My thing isn't perfect because it's a reflection of life. Life isn't perfect. Besides, a sweater or a hat would

Janet Evanovich

photograph?" "Information

It's all I ever really wanted, that revelation. The possibility of fixed stars.

I imagined Kandinsky's mind, spread out all over the world, and then gathered together. Everyone having only a piece of the puzzle. Only in a show like this could you see the complete picture, stack the pieces up, hold them to the light, see how it all fit together. It made me hopeful, like someday my life would make sense too, if I could just hold all the pieces together at the same time.

What happened to a dream without a dreamer?

what was the point in creating something that was so futile and so precious? everything beautiful was like that. a little bit of the true world. beauty said there was something more than just one fucking thing after another. time could rest for a moment, stop and that senseless motion. people thot beauty was bullshit, just a bandaide slapped over the abyss, but they couldnt be more wrong. beauty mattered, it was the only thing that fed you when everything turned to shit.

Just make sure nothing is wasted. Take notes. Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.

It's their skins I'm peeling, she said. The skins of the insipid scribblers, which I graft to the page, creating monsters of meaninglessness.

The way Starr felt in church, that's how I felt at the art museum, both safe and elevated.

Remember...we don't see objects, we see light. [...] Light can do anything water can do--flow, wash, trickle. It can do anything an artist can do--paint, burnish, carve. Candlelight falls, licks a face. There is always light in a room.

Well, she wasn't strong enough to avoid being the background of my art. Just the background. Her words just my canvas.

Claire made me think it was worth trying. Of course you took the honors classes. Of course you wore your jewelry. Of course you signed up for art classes at the museum. Of course. In

I suppose they cannot imagine what a person might be called upon to endure, when a line of poetry can mean the difference between strength and despair.

It's magic, Astrid. You have to know how to reach up and pull beauty out of thin air.

Always learn poems by heart," she said. "They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.

It's the difference between a true artist and everybody else. Claire sighed. They can remake the world.

It was all I ever really wanted, that revelation. The possibility of fixed stars.

the gamelan created in the listener a brain wave beyond all alphas and betas and thetas, a brain wave that paralyzed the normal channels of thought and forced new ones to grow outside them, in the untouched regions of the mind, like parallel blood vessels that form to accommodate a damaged heart.

Do go on," I said, and it sounded just like Mother. It just came out.

I imagined Kandinsky's mind, spread out all over the world, and then gathered together. Everyone having only a piece of the puzzle. Only in a show like this could you see the complete picture, stack the pieces up, hold them to the light, see how it all fit together. It made me hopeful, like someday my life would make sense too, if I could just hold all the pieces together at the same time.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

The writer, like a murderer, needs a motive.

But I refused to mope about for the evening. My little ritual with teacup, familiar chair, and a favorite Dickens story went a long way toward improving my outlook.