“I found a new chord the other day. I was like, ‘Shit, if I had known that years ago…’ That’s what’s beautiful about the guitar. You think you know it all, but it keeps opening up new doors. I look at life as six strings and twelve frets. If I can’t figure out everything that’s in there, what chance do I have of figuring out anything else?”

Keith Richards

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“Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.”

Saul Bellow

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“I am in love with the world. And I look right now, as we speak together, out my window in my studio and I see my trees and my beautiful, beautiful maples that are hundreds of years old, they’re beautiful. And you see I can see how beautiful they are. I can take time to see how beautiful they are. It is a blessing to get old. It is a blessing to find the time to do the things, to read the books, to listen to the music.”

Maurice Sendak

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“She is forty-five and austerely handsome, with large eyes the color of coal and a wide, upturned mouth that often gives her a wry expression. She wears sneakers, black trousers, a wool cardigan with elbow patches—the indifferent wardrobe of someone who devotes her energy to looking rather than to being seen.”

Emily Eakin

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“We find a delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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“‘Well, I am pretty,’ replied Charlotte. ‘There’s no denying that. Almost all spiders are rather nice-looking. I’m not as flashy as some, but I’ll do.'”

E. B. White

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“An echo is often more beautiful than the voice it repeats.”

Oscar Wilde

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“When I bought my farm, I did not know what a bargain I had in the bluebirds, bobolinks, & thrushes. As little did I know what sublime mornings & sunsets I was buying.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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“Everything has a message…Everything is the product of the mind. Everything that is ugly is the product of ugly minds. Beauty is a by-product of intellectual elegance.”

Massimo Vignelli

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“Being a poet, divining beauty, is like divining nature—a gift. It does not matter if one does not create. It is enough to have the poetic vision. To see the beauty hidden. As I did tonight, hearing someone whistle in the distance as I stood by an open window. I felt all kinds of moods of streets at night, of walking with loved women, of the dark blue and whiteness, and the strange, magical desertion of streets at night. I felt it all exactly in a moment, such a rush of impressions that they can hardly be seized. Algernon Blackwood: ‘To feel like a poet is not to be a poet.’ True, yet, poetry making is not necessarily the printing of words. It is a philosophical outlook, an epicureanism, a hedonism.”

John Fowles

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“Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.”

Patti Smith

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“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Only press on: no feeling is final.”

Rainer Maria Rilke

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“Beauty is worth saving. An impractical, beautiful dirt road with a shading canopy can nourish a person’s mind and spirit, and people who are fed by the lovely aspects around them enrich the life of any town.”

Susan Hand Shetterly

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“Doing beautiful things is its own reward. If you do something that you’re proud of, that someone else understands, that is a thing of beauty that wasn’t there before—you can’t beat that.”

Raymond Joseph Teller

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“In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable—which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.”

Marilynne Robinson

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