Tail Feathers

“In nature there’s no blemish but the mind;

None can be called deformed but the unkind.

”

—

William Shakespeare,

Twelfth Night, or, What You Will

(Antonio at III, iv)

#William Shakespeare #quotes #lit

“I’m glad I’ve been wrong enough to keep in practice… You can’t avoid it, you’ve got to learn to handle it. If you only come face to face with your own mistakes once or twice in your life it’s bound to be extra painful. I face mine every day—that way they ain’t usually much worse than a dry shave.”

― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

”

#Larry McMurtry #lit #quotes

“Just spunk won’t be enough; you’ve got to have gumption. You’ve got to bear it in mind that nobody that ever lived is specially privileged; the axe can fall at any moment, on any neck, without any warning or any regard for justice. You’ve got to keep your mind off of pitying your own rotten luck and setting up any kind of howl about it. You’ve got to remember that things as bad as this and a hell of a lot worse have happened to millions of people before and that they’ve come through it and you can too. You’ll bear it because there isn’t any choice—except to go to pieces… It’s kind of a test, Mary, and it’s the only kind that amounts to anything. When something rotten like this happens. Then you have your choice. You start to really be alive, or you start to die. That’s all.”

—

James Agee, A Death in the Family

Agee’s autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family won the author a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.

#James Agee #lit

bofransson:

Lita Cabellut

DULCINEA 10

260 x 200cm, mixed media, 2010

“… her name is Dulcinea, her country El Toboso, a village of La Mancha, her rank must be at least that of a princess, since she is my queen and lady, and her beauty superhuman, since all the impossible and fanciful attributes of beauty which the poets apply to their ladies are verified in her; for her hairs are gold, her forehead Elysian fields, her eyebrows rainbows, her eyes suns, her cheeks roses, her lips coral, her teeth pearls, her neck alabaster, her bosom marble, her hands ivory, her fairness snow, and what modesty conceals from sight such, I think and imagine, as rational reflection can only extol, not compare.” [Volume 1/Chapter XIII, Miguel de Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote].

#Lita Cabellut #Don Quixote #lit

“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.”

— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

#Leo Tolstoy #quotes #Anna Karenina #lit

Heinrich Matvejevich Maniser (Russian, 1847 - 1925)

Anna Karenina, c. 1904

#Heinrich Maniser #Heinrich Matvejevich Maniser #portrait #lit #ART

“What can it profit a man to gain the whole world and to come to his property with a gastric ulcer, a blown prostate and bifocals?Mack and the boys avoid the trap, walk around the poison, step over the noose while a generation of trapped„ poisoned, and trussed-up men scream at them and call them no-goods, come to bad ends, blot-on-the town-thieves, rascals, bums. Our Father who art in nature, who has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great and overwhelming love for no-goods and blots-on-the town and bums„ and Mack and the boys. Virtues and graces and laziness and zest. Our Father who art in nature.”

— John Steinbeck, Cannery Row, first published 1945

#John Steinbeck #lit #quotes

Arthur Irwin Riley (1911 - 1998) | Back of Cannery Row

“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitant are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gambler and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holymen” and he would have meant the same thing.”

― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row, first published 1945

#Art Riley #Arthur Irwin Riley #art #california #watercolor #John Steinbeck #lit

“No, the Boss corrected, I’m not a lawyer. I know some law. … but I’m not a lawyer. That’s why I can see what the law is like. It’s like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed and a cold night. There ain’t ever enough blanket to cover the case, no matter how much pulling and hauling, and somebody is always going to nigh catch pneumonia. Hell, the law is like the pants you bought last year for a growing boy, but it is always this year and the seams are popped and the shankbone’s to the breeze. The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind. The best you can do is do something and then make up some law to fit and by the time that law gets on the books you would have done something different.”

— Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

#Robert Penn Warren #law #quotes #lit

FRANK EARLE SCHOONOVER (American, 1877-1972)

The Whelps of the Wolf, 1922

Oil on canvas, 36 x 27 inches

Front piece illustration for The Whelps of the Wolf, George Marsh, The Penn Publishing Company, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1923.

#FRANK EARLE SCHOONOVER #lit #painting #Illustration

“You will find as you grow older that the first thing needful to make the world a tolerable place to live in is to recognize the inevitable selfishness of humanity. You demand unselfishness from others, which is a preposterous claim that they should sacrifice their desires to yours. Why should they? When you are reconciled to the fact that each is for himself in the world you will ask less from your fellows. They will not disappoint you, and you will look upon them more charitably. Men seek but one thing in life — their pleasure.”

— W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

#W. Somerset Maugham #lit #quotes

“Reshaping life! People who can say that they have never understood a thing about life—they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat—however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it.” - Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

Boris Pasternak (left) with his brother; painting by their father, Leonid Pasternak.

#Boris Pasternak #Leonid Pasternak #lit #painting #art history

“Chance furnishes me with what I need,” Joyce told a Swiss friend when he was writing “Finnegans Wake.” “I’m like a man who stumbles; my foot strikes something, I look down, and there is exactly what I’m in need of.”

—

Silence, Exile, Punning

James Joyce’s chance encounters.

by Louis Menand, New Yorker, July 2, 2012

#James Joyce #lit #quotes

Mabel Alvarez (American 1891-1985)

Interior, oil on canvas board, 24 x 20 in

#Mabel Alvarez #art history #books #art #lit

“A true artist is the survivor of a style… Rufino Tamayo. . . abandoned the stereotyped vision of reality (the freezing point of styles) and set out to see the world with different eyes. What his gaze revealed to him was, naturally, something incredible. Is that not one of the missions of the painter: to teach us to see what we had failed to see, to teach us to believe in what he sees?

Certain artists aspire to see what has never been seen before; others, to see in a way that no one has ever seen before. Tamayo belongs to the second lineage. To see the world with different eyes, in his case, means to see it as if his gaze were the pirmordial gaze. A pitiless and immediate vision, an almost inhuman clear-sightedness, rarely attained save by a very few artists.

Between our gaze and the world images previously produced by habit, culture, museums, or ideologies interpose themselves. The first thing a painter must do is to brush away from his eyes the spiderwebs of styles and schools. The experience is dizzying and blinding: the world leaps to our eyes with the innocent ferocity of what is too alive.

Seeing without intermediaries: a painful apprenticeship that never ends. Perhaps that is why painters, unlike poets, create their freshest works at the end of their days: once they have grown old they manage to see like children.

Asceticism of vision: the hand learning to obey the eye and not the head, until the head stops thinking and begins to see, until the hand conceives and the eye thinks. To see the world in this way is to see it with one’s whole body and mind, to regain the original unity in order to win back the original gaze.

The primordial gaze: the gaze that is neither before nor after thought, the gaze that thinks. The thinking of that gaze tears off the rind and the crust of the world, opens it like a fruit. Reality is not what we see but what we discover.

Octavio Paz, ‘From Criticism to Offering,’ Essays on Mexican Art

__________________________________________________________

Rufino Tamayo, (Mexican, 1899 -1991) - El Hombre, 1953

Vinyl with pigment on panel - Dallas Museum of Art

#Octavio Paz #Rufino Tamayo #aesthetics #art history #lit #Mexico