Quotenik
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beauty

“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?”

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source: Oct. 17, 2002 interview by David Fricke, in The Rolling Stone Interviews, ed. by Jann S. Wenner and Joe Levy (New York: Back Bay Books, 2007), 440.

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medium: Interview

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

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source: Herzog (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 237.

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medium: Fiction

“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.”

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source: “The Pig Wants to Party: Maurice Sendak’s Latest,” Fresh Air with Terry Gross, NPR, September 20, 2011. Transcript here.

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medium: Interview

“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.”

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source: “Celluloid Hero: Tacita Dean’s exhilirating homage to film,” by Emily Eakin, New Yorker, October 31, 2011, 54.

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medium: Magazine profile

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

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source: “Illusions,” in The Conduct of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1904), 316.

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medium: nonfiction

notes: Emerson's essay collection A Conduct of Life was first published in 1860

“‘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.'”

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source: Charlotte’s Web (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 37.

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medium: Fiction

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

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source: Sebastian Melmoth (London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1905), 131.

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medium: Nonfiction

“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.”

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source: Emerson in His Journals, selected and edited by Joel Porte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 505.

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medium: Journal

“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.”

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source: “A Design Life Force,” by Ralph Gardner, The Wall Street Journal, March 11, 2011.

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medium: newspaper article

“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.”

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source: entry dated September 24, 1949, in The Journals: Volume One 1949–1965 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 4.

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medium: journal

“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.”

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source: “National Book Award for Patti Smith,” by Julie Bosman, The New York Times, November 17, 2010.

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medium: newspaper story

notes: from her acceptance speech at the ceremony for the National Book Awards

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

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source: From The Book of Hours in The Poetry of Rilke, trans. and ed. by Edward Snow (New York: North Point Press, 2009), 33.

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medium: poetry

notes: from Mary Karr's Twitter feed

“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.”

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source: “Country Road,” in Settled in the Wild: Notes from the Edge of Town (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2010), 124.

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medium: nonfiction

“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.”

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source: “Penn and Teller Interview,” Telegraph, by Benjamin Secher, July 9, 2010.

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medium: interview

notes: Silent half of the magic team Penn + Teller. He changed his legal name to 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.”

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source: Gilead (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 197.

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medium: fiction

via: The Bronze Medal
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