Laura > Laura's Quotes

“Paradigm
He was aware of his task and people were waiting for his words but he was forbidden to speak. Now where he lives he is free to speak but nobody listens and, moreover, he forgot what he had to say.”
― Czeslaw Milosz

“Contemporary trends of thought have imagined art to be a fountain, whereas it is a sponge. They have decided that art ought to gush forth, whereas it should absorb and become saturated. They think it can be broken down into means of depiction, whereas it is composed of organs of perception. Its proper task is to be always among the spectators and to look more purely, receptively and faithfully than all others.”
― Boris Pasternak

“The process of remembering contributes to that which endures.”
― Adrian Del Caro, Hölderlin: The Poetics of Being

“To oppose something is to maintain it.

They say here "all roads lead to Mishnory." To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.

To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his nonexistence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof. Thus proof is a word not often used among the Handdarata, who have chosen not to treat God as a fact, subject either to proof or unproof or to belief: and they have broken the circle, and go free.

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough. ...
For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Alas, our fundamental experience is duality: mind and body, freedom and necessity, evil and good, and certainly world and God. It is the same with our protest against pain and death. In the poetry I select I am not seeking an escape from dread but rather proof that dread and reverence can exist within us simultaneously.”
― Czeslaw Milosz

“Through its inborn faculty of hearing, poetry seeks the melody of nature amid the noise of the dictionary, then, picking it out like picking out a tune, it gives itself up to improvisation on that theme.”
― Boris Pasternak

“Sometimes the world loses its face. it becomes too base. The task of the poet is to restore its face, because otherwise man is lost in doubt and despair. It is an indication that the world need not always be like this; it can be different.
When I wrote...that I accepted the salvational goal of poetry, that was exactly what I had in mind, and I still believe that poetry can either save or destroy nations.”
― Czeslaw Milosz

“Commonly, people think of philosophy as a quest, however ill advised, for truth. John Dewey called it the quest for certainty. But it is more illuminating to say that, at its best, philosophy is the quest for honesty.”
― Walter Kaufmann, The Faith of a Heretic

“As it fantasizes, poetry comes across nature. The real, living world is the only project of the imagination which has once succeeded and which still goes on being endlessly successful. Look at it continuing, moment after moment a success. It is still real, still deep, utterly absorbing. It is not something you are disappointed in next morning. It serves the poet as example, even more than a sitter or a model.”
― Boris Pasternak

“To gladden the reader with attractive interweavings of language is not the purpose of creative work. My purpose, when I sit down to a work, is not to gladden anybody, either myself or any other, but to make that work as perfect as possible. Gladness afterwards, when it’s done. … Gladness afterwards – and a lot of it. But a lot of tiredness too. This tiredness of mine when the work is finished is something I honour. It means that there was something to overcome and that the work did not come to me without cost. It means it was worthwhile waging the battle. That same tiredness I honour in the reader. If he is tired from my work, it means he has read well, and read something good. The reader’s tiredness is not devastating, but creative. Co-creative. It does honour to both the reader and me.”
― Marina Tsvetaeva, Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry

“Indeed, it is worth asking whether this is not a feature that is more often found than not in the greatest books. They do not mainly seek to add to our knowledge: they do not disdain shocking us because what they most want to do is change us.””
― Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism, Religion, and Death: Thirteen Essays

“What is clearest, most memorable and important about art is its coming into being, and the world's best works of art, while telling of very diverse matters, are really telling about their birth.”
― William Butler Yeats

“Only one who has mastered a tradition has a right to attempt to add to it or rebel against it.”
― Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev

“A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.”
― Steve Martin

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain