“The number of hours we have together is actually not so large. Please linger near the door uncomfortably instead of just leaving. Please forget your scarf in my life and come back later for it.”

— Mikko Harvey, from “For M,” Foundry (no. 9, September 2018)

Little Women, 2019 | Greta Gerwig

“The ceramics teacher announced that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pounds of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work-and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”

— David Bayles, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

when tennessee williams said “the great difference between people in this world is not between the rich and the poor or the good and the evil, the biggest of differences in this world is between the ones that had or have pleasure in love and those that haven’t and hadn’t any pleasure in love, but just watched it with envy, sick envy” and when james baldwin said “not many people have ever died of love but multitudes have perished and are perishing every hour for the lack of it” and when ilse aichinger said “it remains the hardest to bear all the tenderness and only to gaze on”

“Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs, Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.”

— William Shakespeare, Richard II, Act III Scene II (via mirroir)

“Why are some people drawn to minimalist architecture and others to Baroque? Why are some people excited by bare concrete walls and others by William Morris’s floral patterns? Our tastes will depend on what spectrum of our emotional make-up lies in shadow and is hence in need of stimulation and emphasis. Every work of art is imbued with a particular psychological and moral atmosphere: a painting may be either serene or restless, bourgeois or aristocratic, and our preferences for one kind over another reflect our varied psychological gaps. We hunger for artworks that will compensate for our inner fragilities and help return us to a viable mean. We call a work ‘beautiful’ when it supplies the virtues we are missing, and we dismiss as ‘ugly’ one that forces on us moods or motifs that we feel either threatened or already overwhelmed by. Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.”

— Alain de Botton & John Armstong, Art as Therapy