Quotations from the seventh and eighth weeks of 2013

Despite much reading (including a really poorly written/translated book about Cezanne) and writing over the last two weeks, there has not been a particularly quotable quotation (well, nothing I've written down).  So I'm making up some of my own.

"The image of the tortured artist is inaccurate.  We are all tortured, but the artist has the patience and skill to articulate it."

"Life is bitter.  This makes alcohol taste so sweet."

"The sign of a good musician is showing how few notes you need to play."

That last one is something I posted to Twitter which is a much more relaxed, frivolous, and artistic attempt at social media.  It's not all about poop, but a lot of it is.

Quotations from the sixth week of 2013

Concerning St. Valentine's day:

"Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder."

--Aldous Huxley

Concerning the day after St. Valentine's Day:

"Can I be as I believe myself or as others believe me to be?  Here is where these lines become a confession in the presence of my unknown and unknowable me, unknown and unknowable for myself.  Here is where I create the legend wherein I must bury myself."

--Miguel de Unamuno

Quotations from the fifth week of 2013

"A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist.  I no longer think about it, I am."

--Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

"Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it."

--Niels Bohr

Quotations from the fourth week of 2013

Since I didn't write anything down from the fourth week of 2013 to type up, here are some of my own.

I read McCarthy's Suttree and reread The Sun Also Rises.  Every year I reread TSAR and it's probably the closest I get to religion.  It's like my Christmas--or rather my Hanukkah since I like to draw out the experience, savor the words, the style, the structure, the psychology, the story.  Many times the longer I spend reading a book, the more I enjoy it.  The novels that go by in a flash like an express train can be hard for me to remember.  The experience may have been enjoyable, but I didn't get a chance to read any of the graffiti on the boxcars.

Because I did start this blog under the guise of a baseball blog centered on the Cubs, I may as well mention that we are not much more than two months from the beginning of the season, and only a few weeks from the start of spring training.  I think what most concerns me is Spring.  I always feel much better and more optimistic when the weather warms.  So perhaps it is not the impending season that gets me more energetic as much as the growing sunlight and building warmth, the freedom allowed by the shedding the clothes and the generally positive disposition of the world around us when the sky is blue and the temperatures comfortable.  This is probably why we are so inclined to small talk about the weather and sports.

And now for some photos because if there is one thing tumblr has taught me, it's that people don't want to read, they want to look.

Quotations from the third week of 2013

"It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing."

--Jacob Barnes

"I can only encourage you to steal as much as you can.  No one will ever notice.  You should keep a notebook of tidbits, but don't write down the attributions, and then after a couple years you can come back to the notebook and treat the stuff as your own without guilt."

--W.G. Sebald

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."

--T.S. Eliot

Quotations from the second week of 2013

"It takes a lot of time to be a genius.  You have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing."

--Gertrude Stein

"Successful people do the things that others don't want to do."

--NBC golf commentator and former PGA Tour golfer Johnny Miller's father

Quotations from the first week of 2013

You're cute and smart, and you've gotten everything you've ever asked for, and that makes you lazy and dangerous.

- Sherman Alexie - "The Search Engine"

In a thousand years' time who will care what they looked like?

- Michelangelo

No, the tranquil desert island, the solitary paradise doesn't exist.  One would be quickly bored there because one would have no problems.

- Matisse

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.

- Emerson