"He has other lovers. I mean nothing to him.

She's badly shaken by her behavior. Nothing in her life has prepared her for it. Standing on the redwood deck overlooking the beach, the ocean, staring into the distance where she'd first seen Jean-Claude emerge limping out of the mist. At her feet there's something moving; she gives a little cry and moves away. A small sand crab? A large hard-shelled beetle? Ceci runs to investigate. 'Oh, Mommy. He's hurt.'"

Hunger by Joyce Carol Oates in Female of the Species (2005)

"When man is happy, the meaning of life and other eternal themes rarely interest him." - Snaut


from Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972)

Once I heard girls singing a May Day song that went:


Violante in the pantry
Gnawing at a mutton bone
How she gnawed it
How she clawed it
When she felt herself alone.


Girls are cruelest to themselves.

from The Glass Essay by Anne Carson (1994)

"Everybody protests that artists are irresponsible, but artists are not concerned with the material world. I would advise them to turn away from this world and go on a picnic or something. Go into the forest and feel the difference."

- Agnes Martin, Interview with Irving Sandler, 1993

From Documents of Contemporary Art, "Beauty" Ed. Dave Beech

"But the truth we seek from novels is different from the truth we seek from memoirs. Novels, you might say, represent "a truth" about life, whereas memoirs and nonfiction accounts represent "the truth" about specific things that have happened."

- "But Enough About Me" by Daniel Mendelsohn, 1/25/10 issue of The New Yorker

"Criticism, in which the lovers of art used to find support for their opinions, has latterly become so self-contradictory, that, if we exclude from the domain of art all that to which the critics of various schools themselves deny the title, there is scarecly any art left."

- "What is Art" by Leo Tolstoy (1899)

"The essence of [Andy] Warhol's genuis was to eliminate the one aspect of a thing without which that thing would, to conventional ways of thinking, cease to be itself, and then to see what happened."

"[Art critic Clement Greenberg] made the case for the historical necessity of abstraction. Avant-garde artists were compelled to make nonrepresentational paintings, he argued, because of the mass production of commercially manufactured culture - kitsch. Kitsch - popular fiction, Hollywood movies, and so on - was realistic, and its subject was the satisfactions of middle-class life under consumer capitalism. Avant-garde artists responded by making their subject art itself. Avant-garde art, Greenberg believed, was art that explored its own formal possibilites. It was art about art."

- "Top of the Pops" by Louis Menand, 1/11/10 issue of The New Yorker

"There is only reality and light."

- from a poem recited in The Mirror by Andrei Tarkovsky (1975)

"The poet and critic Robert Pinsky was even harsher, speaking of 'what can sometimes seem the sharp distinction' between creative writing and formal literary scholarship - a sharp distinction that came about to the detriment of both. On one side there is 'an immense elaboration of the techniques of composition' accompanied by a 'fatal ignorance of the past'; on the other side an 'elaborate sophistication regarding poetic theory' that goes with 'a fatal ignorance of composition.' The consequence, he said, is 'rhetorical pedantry in the poets; and arid nihilism in the critics.'"

- The Elephants Teach by D.G. Myers (1996)