"I've never known anyone more ill equipped for happiness. He wouldn't know what to do with it."

-- Lisa Kleypas

“The number of strokes to the inch controls the pitch of the note: the more, the higher the pitch; the fewer, the lower the pitch, the size of the stroke controls the loudness... the tone quality is the most difficult element to control, it is made by the shape of the strokes.”
“A chess problem is an exercise in pure mathematics.”
“Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.”
“to be understood is not a human right. Even to understand oneself is not a human right.”
“If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life. I mean people are going to say, You're crazy. Plus they're going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that's a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.”
“I'd rather look good in my coffin than bad in my coffin.”
“Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.”
“An essential portion of any artist's labor is not creation so much as invocation”

Source : Lewis Hyde (2009). “The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World”, p.186, Vintage

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