Joyelle McSweeney famous quotes

My notion of art is very maximalist and souped-up: I love spectacle, overload, magic materials, magic words, incantation and litany, incarnation and possession, spilling and wounds. Art as a sacred event.
-- Joyelle McSweeney

#Art #Magic #Events

I've begun to recognize myself as a Catholic writer because my whole notion of the image, of symbol, of art and what it can do, has been conditioned by my immersion in Catholic culture, ritual, and art since my earliest days. Catholicism seeped into me through every pore. Catholicism is about seeping and pores!
-- Joyelle McSweeney

#Art #Catholic #Culture

The Internet is such a paradoxical space - it's limitless and totally bounded, apparently free yet corporate-controlled, apparently invisible yet surveilled, a place of disembodiment where bodies are policed and enviolenced, a place that is apparently 'nowhere'.
-- Joyelle McSweeney

#Space #Body #Internet

The Internet is a graveyard, a bright malfunctioning littoral, and it is entirely necropastoral. But the necropastoral can't be sustained - it's non-sustainable.
-- Joyelle McSweeney

#Internet #Graveyard

You can't drive to the coastline. You can only drive so close to the white chalky cliff and then you have to get out and dive.
-- Joyelle McSweeney

#White #Cliffs #Coastline

Teachers believe they have a gift for giving; it drives them with the same irrepressible drive that drives others to create a work of art or a market or a building.

Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be derived also from their other ingredients. I am convinced that most readers, when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry.

How aware were photographers in the past of other visual arts? "No photographer of any distinction at all could approach his work without some awareness of what was going on in other visual media, and for that matter neither the painter nor the draughtsman could ignore photography."

We look at the world and see what we have learned to believe is there. We have been conditioned to expect... but, as photographers, we must learn to relax our beliefs.

There's a little bit of magic in every box!

Magic likes a good tragedy, too.

The table was her stage. The mobile phone was the microphone. And the new moon was the spotlight. That kind of magic only Nana could make it happen.

To get the medium's magic to work for one's aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.

It's customary when great events happen that the U.S. punishes its friends and rewards its enemies.

Authorities arrest me, release me, and then invite me back to host public events. I think it's interesting.