“Why do men have nipples? Because God is a woman and she really wants us to enjoy ourselves, that's why.”
Source: Passionate Thirst
“It is the very essence of art,' she [Hallie Flanagan:] told a group gathered in Washington . . ., 'that it exceed bounds, often including those of tradition, decorum, and that mysterious thing called taste. It is the essence of art that it shatter accepted patterns, advance into unknown territory, challenge the existing order. Art is highly explosive. To be worth its salt it must have in that salt a fair sprinkling of gunpowder.”
Source: Furious Improvisation: How the Wpa and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art Out of Desperate Times
“In the past an artist produced things that were necessary socially; they were instruments, albeit of a special kind, that helped the dead reach eternity, spells to be cast, prayers to be liturgically fleshed. . . . The aesthetic component of those instruments enhanced their function but was never central, never an independent, nonutilitarian thing.”
Source: Highcastle: A Remembrance
“Thinking is not a thing that can undo itself. It can never be its own solution.”
Source: boring boring boring boring boring boring boring
“Art serves to confront that which is outside order, to give form to the obscene. In the process, it opens it to transformations that can not only make it safe for public consumption, not a powerful vehicle through which to address the public imagination.”
“The source of our art then is not in the achievements of other artists in other days and lands, although it has learned a great deal from these, our art is founded on a long and growing love and understanding of the North in an ever clearer experience of oneness with the informing spirit of the whole land and a strange brooding sense of Mother Nature fostering a new race and a new age... So the Canadian artist was drawn North.”
Source: The Best of the Group of Seven
“Early in this century a group of passionate artists in Russia claimed that the essence of art was to make the familiar seem strange. Perhaps this is also one of the roles of the exotic, to alter and sharpen our perceptions.”
Source: Bringing the Mountain Home
“On a cement pediment stands the inevitable bronze statue of a man in a cheap suit.”
Source: The Savage Girl
“Praise be to God, Who has so disposed matters that pleasant literary anecdotes may serve as an instrument for the polishing of wits and the cleansing of rust from our hearts.”
Source: The Delight of Hearts: Or What You Will Not Find in Any Book
“On the one hand, it is in and through creative minds that the community fulfils itself at its best and reaches its highest forms; and on the other, it is from them that the community recovers the social substance with which it had nourished them, transfigured by their creative alchemy into a still higher social substance. The creative evolution of his community and his own creative evolution must always be the two earnest purposes of the individual. Its own creative evolution and that of the individuals in its midst must always be the two earnest purposes of the community.”
Source: Essays with a Purpose