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A Quotes

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All A Quotes

“After all these recent events in Russia - "Crimea is ours!," Donbas, all that - I realized I could get back into the business of forecasting. Until now, I didn't feel up to it. I actually was wrong about one thing: I predicted that Putin would be forced to leave soon, but he's still there. Generally, once again - this time not in seventy years but in a very short time - the President and the Duma have reached the stage of such idiocy that they are constantly taking actions which are not simply pointless but harmful, to Russia itself.”

“After all these weeks, after all of this, I feel that I am finally going to pieces, and I find, stunningly, that as I turn about in the street, I am praying, a habit of my childhood, when I would try to cover my bets with a God in whom I knew I did not much believe. And now, dear God, I think, dear God in whom I do not believe, I pray you to stop this, for I am deathly frightened. Dear God, I smell my fear, with an oder as distinct as ozone on the air after a lightening flash. I feel fear so palpable it has a color, an oozing fiery red, and I feel it pitifully in my bones, which ache. My pain is so extreme that I can barely move down this hot avenue, and for a moment cannot, as my backbone bows with fear, as if a smelted rod, red-hot and livid, had been laid there. Dear God, dear God, I am in agony and fear, and whatever I may have done to make you bring this down upon me, release me, please, I pray, release me. Release me. Dear God in whom I do not believe, dear God, let me go free.”

“After all these years of wandering around as a street photographer and a journalist, I decided that this world is such a curious, screwed up place so full of contradictions... that I couldn't look at it any more in the raw form without trying to find some way of balancing it in a more philosophical context - less in a reportorial manner and more in an artistic one.”

“After all, wanting to be understood is a basic need — an affirmation of the humanity you share with everyone around you. The risk is fearsome: in making your real work you hand the audience the power to deny the understanding you seek; you hand them the power to say, “you’re not like us; you’re weird; you’re crazy.” And admittedly, there’s always a chance they may be right — your work may provide clear evidence that you are different, that you are alone. After all, artists themselves rarely serve as role models of normalcy.... Just how unintelligible your art — or you — appear to others may be something you don’t really want to confront, at least not all that quickly. What is sometimes needed is simply an insulating period, a gap of pure time between the making of your art, and the time when you share it with outsiders. Andrew Wyeth pursued his Helga series privately for years, working at his own pace, away from the spotlight of criticism and suggestion that would otherwise have accompanied the release of each new piece in the series. Such respites also, perhaps, allow the finished work time to find its rightful place in the artist’s heart and mind — in short, a chance to be understood better by the maker. Then when the time comes for others to judge the work, their reaction (whatever it may be) is less threatening.”