Utter Quotes

The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night.

To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.

Disqualified as a human being. I had now ceased utterly to be a human being.

It turns out that addressing the most urgent problems of our time is, well, hard. But what is maddening about this debate is not how difficult fair-tax implementation would be but how utterly easy it is to find enough money to defeat poverty by closing nonsensical tax loopholes. If you don’t like the changes I suggested above, I can propose twenty smaller reforms, or fifty tinier ones, or a hundred even more innocuous nudges to get us there. We could raise $25 billion by winding down the mortgage interest deduction, which disproportionately benefits high-income families and does nothing to promote homeownership. We could find $64.7 billion by increasing the maximum taxable amount of earnings for Social Security so that high- and low-income workers are taxed at the same rate. We could scratch out another $37.3 billion if we treated capital gains and dividends for wealthy Americans the same way we treat income for tax purposes.

And when the work is going well, why on earth would we want to know? Most of the myriad of steps that go into making a piece (or a year’s worth of pieces) go on below the level of conscious thought, engaging unarticulated beliefs and assumptions about what artmaking is...We rarely think about how or why we do such things — we just do them. Changing the pattern of outcome in your work means first identifying things about your approach that are as automatic as wedging the clay, as subtle as releasing the arrow from the bow. ...We use predictable work habits to get us into the studio and into our materials; we use recurrent bits of form as starting points for making specific pieces. ....The discovery of useful forms is precious. Once found, they should never be abandoned for trivial reasons...any device that carries the first brushstroke to the next blank canvas has tangible, practical value. ....The private details of artmaking are utterly uninteresting to audiences (and frequently to teachers), perhaps because they’re almost never visible — or even knowable — from examining the finished work. ....The hardest part of artmaking is living your life in such a way that your work gets done, over and over — and that means, among other things, finding a host of practices that are just plain useful. A piece of art is the surface expression of a life lived within productive patterns. Over time, the life of a productive artist becomes filled with useful conventions and practical methods, so that a string of finished pieces continues to appear at the surface. And in truly happy moments those artistic gestures move beyond simple procedure, and acquire an inherent aesthetic all their own. They are your artistic hearth and home, the working-places-to-be that link form and feeling. They become — like the dark colors and asymmetrical lilt of the Mazurka — inseparable from the life of their maker. They are canons. They allow confidence and concentration. They allow not knowing. They allow the automatic and unarticulated to remain so.