"Right now, you and me here, put together entirely from atoms that have been part of millions of other organisms before they became us, sitting on this round rock with a core of liquid iron held down by this force that so troubles you called gravity, all the while spinning around the sun at 67 thousand miles an hour and whizzing through the Milky Way at 600 thousand miles an hour in a universe that very well may be chasing its own tail at the speed of light... and amidst all this frantic activity, fully cognizant of our own imminent demise, which is a very pretty way of saying we all know we're going to die, we reach out, to one another, sometimes for the sake of vanity, sometimes for reasons you're not old enough to understand yet, but a lot of the time we just reach out... and expect nothing in return. Isn't that strange? Isn't that weird? ... Isn't that... weird... enough?"
— Jonathon Tolins/Seth Bass/David Gerrold

"The reaction on the part of the apes, limited as it was to about one subject in every three or four, has just that character of being common, yet individual, that belongs to aesthetic experiences. Some are sensitive to the sight, and the rest are not; to some of them it seems to convey something -- to others it is just a thing, a toadstool or what you will."
— Susanne K. Langer

"Quick work doesn't mean less serious work, it depends on one's self-confidence and experience. In the same way Jules Guérard, the lion hunter, says in his book that in the beginning young lions have a lot of trouble killing a horse or an ox, but that the old lions kill with a single blow of the paw or a well-placed bite, and that they are amazingly sure at the job... I must warn you that everyone will think that I work too fast. Don't you believe a word of it. Is it not emotion, the sincerity of one's feeling for nature, that draws us, and if the emotions are sometimes so strong that one works without knowing one works, when sometimes the strokes come with a continuity and coherence like words in a speech or a letter, then one must remember that it has not always been so, and that in time to come there will again be hard days, empty of inspiration. So one must strike while the iron is hot, and put the forged bars on one side."
— Vincent Van Gogh

"I used to try and concentrate the poem so much that there wasn't a word that wasn't essential. This leads to becoming boring and constipated."
— W.H. Auden