Amy > Amy's Quotes

“Art is essentially serious and beneficial, a game played against chaos and death, against entropy. It is a tragic game, for those who have the wit to take it seriously, because our side must lose; a comic game-or so a troll might say-because only a clown with sawdust brains would take our side and eagerly join in.”
― John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

“The critic's proper business is explanation and evaluation, which means he must make use of his analytic powers to translate the concrete to the abstract.”
― John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

“True art is a conduit between body and soul, between feeling unabstracted and abstraction unfelt.”
― John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

“Art gropes. It stalks like a hunter lost in the woods, listening to itself and to everything around it, unsure of itself, waiting to pounce.”
― John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

“To put all this in the form of another traditional metaphor, aesthetic styles—patterns for communicating feeling and thought—become dull with use, like carving knives, and since dullness is the chief enemy of art, each generation of artists must find new ways of slicing the fat off reality.”
― John Gardner, John Gardner on Writing: On Becoming a Novelist, On Writers & Writing, and On Moral Fiction

“...art deals, at its best, with what has never been observed, or observed only peripherally-darts from what is to what might have been-asking with total interest and sobriety such questions as 'what if apple trees could talk?' or 'what if the haughty old woman next door should fall in love with Mr. Powers, our mailman?' The artist's imagination, or the world it builds, is the laboratory of the unexperienced, both the heroic and the unspeakable.”
― John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

“Art is as original and important as it is precisely because it does not start out with clear knowledge of what it means to say.”
― John Gardner, John Gardner on Writing: On Becoming a Novelist, On Writers & Writing, and On Moral Fiction

“The artist composes, writes, or paints just as he dreams, seizing whatever swims close to his net. This, not the world seen directly, is his raw material.”
― John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

“Art combines fancy and judgement.”
― John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

“True art imitates nature's total process: endless blind experiment (fish that climb tress, hands with nine fingers, shifts in and out of tonality) and then ruthless selectivity-the artist's sober judgements, like a lion's, of what can be killed, what is better left alone, such as (for the lion) rhinos and certain nasty snakes. Art, in sworn opposition to chaos, discovers by its process what it can say. That is art's morality.”
― John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

“True art is too complex to reflect the party line.”
― John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

“Only in lament does the artist cry out, 'Birds build but not I build," and the lament points to how things ought to be: art builds; it never stands pat; it destroys only evil. If art destroys good, mistaking it for evil, then that art is false, an error; it requires denunciation. This, I have claimed, is what true art is about-preservation of the world of gods and men.”
― John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

“True criticism praises true art for what it does-praises as plainly and comprehensively as possible-and denounces false art for its failure to do art's proper work. No easy task, the task of the critic, since the trolls are masters of disguise.”
― John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

“Most art these days is either trivial or false. There has always been bad art, but only when a culture's general world view and aesthetic theory have gone awry is bad art what most artists strive for, mistaking bad for good. In Plato's Athens or Shakespeare's London, who would have clapped for the merdistes? For the most part our artists do not struggle-as artists have traditionally struggled-toward a vision of how things out to be or what has gone wrong; they do not provide us with the flicker of lightning that shows us where we are. Either they pointlessly waste our time, saying and doing nothing, or they celebrate ugliness and futility, scoffing at good. Every new novelist, composer,and painter-or so we're told-is more 'distrubing' than the last. The good of humanity is left in the hands of politicians.”
― John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

“We are rich in schools which speak of how art 'works' and avoid the whole subject of what work it ought to do.”
― John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

“Structuralists, formalists, linguistic philosophers who tell us that works of art are like trees-simply objects for perception-all avoid on principle the humanistic questions: who will this work of art help? what baby is it squashing? The business of criticism has become definition, morality reduced to the positivist ideal of clarity. The trouble is that clarity on the wrong subject can be dangerously misleading, as when we define Count Fosco's crocodile as a smiling animal weighing four hundred pounds.”
― John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

“Nov. 2, 1837. Truth strikes us from behind, and in the dark, as well as from before and in broad daylight.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Feb. 26, 1841. To be great, we do as if we would be tall merely, be longer than we are broad, stretch ourselves and stand on tiptoe. But greatness is well proportioned, unstrained, and stands on the soles of the feet.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Selected Writings

“Truth is the thing you must not say.' She told me this. Known and unknown mourning for a volatile and impossible tongue. Between absence and presence. 'And is that love?'

'What does it matter? Love, a word.”
― Doug Rice

“Every photograph posed itself this one question: Are we allowed to view what is being exposed?”
― Doug Rice, Between Appear and Disappear

“Written words are always waiting.”
― Doug Rice, Between Appear and Disappear

“The lead from her pencil covers her fingers, her knuckles. She rubs out as many words as she writes. Her words always on the verge of being erased. Words written on top of words. Words crossed out. Many of her words are missing. They have been lifted off the pages and rubbed onto her skin. The words that do remain carry her skin with them.”
― Doug Rice, Between Appear and Disappear

“In these days of living in a dry land that wants fire, we need to find words, or burn.

'I dreamt of rain last night.'

Mai stood near my skin, on the bank of the American River, her flesh wet with simplicity. The scent of star thistle mixed with river mud. ' I met people in my dreams who had never known the inside of a lotus flower. Ever.' In the center of each word another word unfolded. Our ankles cold from the river. Her hands trembled. Bewildered fingers.

Be careful around those who claim to know the history of fire and yet remain unafraid of rain.”
― Doug Rice, between appear and disappear

“Each sentence as it is written is written to lead us to a place of silence. The silence that follows each sentence should endure as long as it has taken you to read the sentence. This silence is different from white space. Silence should fill your body, not simply remain on the page. Your body needs to experience the space between. Silence needs to mark you.”
― Doug Rice, between appear and disappear

“True art, by specific technical means now commonly forgotten, clarifies life, establishes models of human action, casts nets toward the future, carefully judges our right and wrong directions, celebrates and mourns. It does not rant. It does not sneer or giggle in the face of death, it invents prayers and weapons. It designs visions worth trying to make fact. It does not whimper or cower or throw up its hands and bat its lashes. It does not make hope contingent on acceptance of some religious theory. It strikes like lightening, or is lightning; whichever.”
― John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

“We need to stop excusing mediocre and downright pernicious art, stop 'taking it for what it’s worth' as we take our fast foods, our overpriced cars that are no good, the overpriced houses we spend all our lives fixing, our television programs, our schools thrown up like barricades in the way of young minds, our brainless fat religions, our poisonous air, our incredible cult of sports, and our ritual of fornicating with all pretty or even horse-faced strangers. We would not put up with a debauched king, but in a democracy all of us are kings, and we praise debauchery as pluralism. This book is of course no condemnation of pluralism; but it is true that art is in one sense fascistic: it claims, on good authority, that some things are healthy for individuals and society and some things are not.”
― John Champlin Gardner, On Moral Fiction