everything we call real

03.24.18

“Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.”

—Niels Bohr as cited by Karan Barad
in Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning

Soap films, from Patterns in Nature by Peter S. Stevens, 1974

a book of spells

03.10.18

“A proper dictionary is a book of spells.”

—Jeanette Winterson
from an interview with the New York Times

a portrait of James Murray, the principal editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, photographer unknown

three levels

02.25.18

“Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.”

—Walter Benjamin
from One Way Street

a page from Proust's manuscript of Le temps retrouvé

questions hidden by answers

02.10.18

“The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by answers.”

—widely attributed to James Baldwin
original context unclear

attribution unknown

glass of water

01.23.18

“There’s only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that’s a writer sitting down to write.”

—Mignon McLaughlin
original context unclear

Hannah Hoch – Der Kleine P (The Little P)

reality tolerance

12.29.17

“No artist tolerates reality.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche

photographer unknown

a wise reader

12.11.17

“A wise reader reads . . . not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine.”

—Vladimir Nabokov
from “Good Readers and Good Writers”

Lucien Freud - The Artist's Mother Reading, 1975