collecting pebbles

Art relies on the conversion of even flaws and defects into positive aesthetic values. It is a strange hymn to stupidity.

* * *

Collecting pebbles for a new mosaic of a world that I could love.

From In That Great River: A Notebook by Anna Kamienska, selected and translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh

beginning and end

The beginning and end of all literary activity is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, all things being grasped, related, recreated, moulded, and reconstructed in a personal form and original manner.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 to 1832)

[A favorite quote of the Edward Hopper who said it applied equally to painting.]

an and, and then another

Everything only connected by “and” and “and.”

—Elizabeth Bishop, “Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance”

to get it right

Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.

—Wallace Stevens, “Adagia,” Opus Posthumous (Vintage, 1990, p. 201)

footnotes to the world

There are books in which the footnotes or comments scrawled by some reader’s hand in the margin are more interesting than the text. The world is one of these books.

—George Santayana, philosopher (1863-1952), Realms of Being (Columbia U. Press, 1940)

fugitive presence

When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you have to think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgement of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself. And I think the world tends to forget that this is the ultimate significance of the body of work each artist produces. It is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitude for the gift of life.

—Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006), The Wild Braid (Norton, 2005)