"In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live."

--

Ralph Ellison

“It sounds so far away and different. I like different places. I like any places that isn't here.”
“A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.”
“I think film, to me, as a director, is about telling a story.”
“The American Indian is of the soil, whether it be the region of forests, plains, pueblos, or mesas. He fits into the landscape, for the hand that fashioned the continent also fashioned the man for his surroundings. He once grew as naturally as the wild sunflowers, he belongs just as the buffalo belonged....”

Source : Luther Standing Bear (2006). “Land of the Spotted Eagle”, p.247, U of Nebraska Press
“It would, of course, be hopeless to attempt to crowd into an international language all those local overtones of meaning which are so dear to the heart of the nationalist.”
“Parliament must not be told a direct untruth, but its quite possible to allow them to mislead themselves.”
“Goethe said, "The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing"; Somerset Maugham says that the finest compliment he ever received was a letter in which one of his readers said: "I read your novel without having to look up a single word in the dictionary." These writers, plainly, lived in different worlds.”
“Not just beautiful, though â€” the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And theyâ€™re watching me. What Iâ€™ve up till now, what Iâ€™m going to do â€” they know it all. Nothing gets past their watchful eyes. As I sit there under the shining night sky, again a violent fear takes hold of me. My heartâ€™s pounding a mile a minute, and I can barely breathe. All these millions of stars looking down on me, and Iâ€™ve never given them more than a passing thought before. Not just the stars â€” how many other things havenâ€™t I noticed in the world, things I know nothing about?”

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