Joseph Cornell Quotes

Beauty should be shared for it enhances our joys. To explore its mystery is to venture towards the sublime.

collage = reality

I remember a man, a very lonely man, coming up to me at the end of a reading and looking into my face and saying, 'I feel as if I have looked down a corridor and seen into your soul.' And I looked at him and said, 'You haven't.' You know, Here's the good news and the bad news: you haven't! I made something, and you and I could look at it together, but it's not me; you don’t live with me; you're not intimate with me. You're not the man I live with or my friend. You will never know me in that way. I'm making something, like Joseph Cornell makes his boxes and everyone looks into them, but it's the box you look into; it's not the man or the woman. It's alchemy of language and memory and imagination and time and music and sounds that gets made, and that's different from 'Here is what happened to me when I was ten.

Recognizing the artist Joseph Cornell's genius for recycling, he inscribed a book to him as the Benvenuto Cellini of Flotsam and Jetsam

I paced while he slept, ricocheting like a dove skidding the lonely confines of a Joseph Cornell box.

Another easy yet impactful activity is to go for nighttime walks, preferably in a natural place like a park or beach. For a bounty of ideas, check out books like Joseph Cornell’s Sharing Nature With Children, Jennifer Ward’s I Love Dirt!, and Susan Sachs Lipman’s Fed Up with Frenzy. Another easy and engaging way to connect kids with nature is to visit your local nature center.

Shadow boxes become poetic theater or settings wherein are metamorphosed the elements of a childhood pastime. The fragile, shimmering globules become the shimmering but more enduring planets—a connotation of moon and tides—the association of water less subtle, as when driftwood pieces make up a proscenium to set off the dazzling white of sea foam and billowy cloud crystallized in a pipe of fancy.

Make for yourself a world you can believe in. It sounds simple, I know. But it’s not. Listen, there are a million worlds you could make for yourself. Everyone you know has a completely different one—the woman in 5G, that cab driver over there, you. Sure, there are overlaps, but only in the details. Some people make their worlds around what they think reality is like. They convince themselves that they had nothing to do with their worlds’ creations or continuations. Some make their worlds without knowing it. Their universes are just sesame seeds and three-day weekends and dial tones and skinned knees and physics and driftwood and emerald earrings and books dropped in bathtubs and holes in guitars and plastic and empathy and hardwood and heavy water and high black stockings and the history of the Vikings and brass and obsolescence and burnt hair and collapsed souffles and the impossibility of not falling in love in an art museum with the person standing next to you looking at the same painting and all the other things that just happen and are. But you want to make for yourself a world that is deliberately and meticulously personalized. A theater for your life, if I could put it like that. Don’t live an accident. Don’t call a knife a knife. Live a life that has never been lived before, in which everything you experience is yours and only yours. Make accidents on purpose. Call a knife a name by which only you will recognize it. Now I’m not a very smart man, but I’m not a dumb one, either. So listen: If you can manage what I’ve told you, as I was never able to, you will give your life meaning.

According to the Pesticide Information Project of Cooperative Extension Offices of Cornell University, Michigan State University, Oregon State University, and University of California at Davis,14 when a chemical toxin enters your body, it actually alters the speed at which many key functions take place. This alteration can decrease the activity of the enzymes that are required for every bodily function. For example, toxins may: •​Increase or decrease heart rate. •​Interrupt neuron connections necessary for the brain to function. •​Decrease the production of thyroid hormones that regulate how fast enzymes work. •​Block insulin-receptor sites on cells so sugar can’t get in to produce energy.

There was a movie theater here once. It played silent films. It was like watching the world through dark glasses on a rainy evening. One night the piano player mysteriously disappeared. We were left with the storming sea that made no sound, and a beautiful woman on a long, empty bench whose tears rolled down silently as she watched me falling asleep in my mother's arms.