"To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity."

“The essential thing is to spring forth, to express the bolt of lightning one senses upon contact with a thing. The function of the artist is not to translate an observation but to express the shock of the object on his nature; the shock, with the original reaction.”

Source : Romare Bearden (2003). “The Art of Romare Bearden”, Harry N Abrams Incorporated

“That I had never heard of such a bird did not surprise me.... But others more experienced also did not know of the Carolina Parakeet. The more I spoke of the bird, the more it seemed that, somehow, its existence had been a chimera. Admittedly, my survey was small and unscientific, but intelligent people who could reel off the names of various dinosaurs and identify sparrows at epic distances could not name the forgotten parakeet. I realized, forcefully, what I suppose I knew abstractly: Histories, like species, can go extinct.”

Source : Christopher Cokinos (2009). “Hope Is the Thing With Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds”, p.12, Penguin

“Thirty years ago dinner theatre used to be much more of a going concern than it is now.”

“She didn't like the fact that she had reduced a man – no matter how evil he might be—to a drooling idiot.”

“The trouble with law is lawyers.”

“One hope no sooner dies in us but another rises up in its stead. We are apt to fancy that we shall be happy and satisfied if we possess ourselves of such and such particular enjoyments; but either by reason of their emptiness, or the natural inquietude of the mind, we have no sooner gained one point, but we extend our hopes to another. We still find new inviting scenes and landscapes lying behind those which at a distance terminated our view.”

“I guess my favorite way to travel is in a car, especially if you get to go some place cool. The bullet train in Japan is cool; but overall, driving through certain areas, like the desert in the United States, or the Black Forest in Germany, you feel the nature unfolding.”

“But there are roughly two sorts of informed people, aren't there? People who start off right by observing the pitfalls and mistakes and going round them, and the people who fall into them and get out and know they're there because of that. They both come to the same conclusions but they don't have quite the same point of view.”

Source : Margery Allingham (2015). “Dancers in Mourning”, p.31, Ipso Books