Pesky Loves

Sometimes the things you wanted most and didn't get are terrible things you've been delivered from.

Something someone else said here.

America I’ve given you all and I’m nothing.

If then, this art is about something, what is it about? Each artist has his notion; so does every spectator.

Life is so meaningless we might as well try to make ourselves extraordinary.

Now it seems cruel, abusive even, but this all happened before the invention of self-esteem, which, frankly, I think is a little overrated.

“I take the liberty to play on any string of my existence,” Rothko told [Helen Frankenthaler]. “Everything is grist for the mill.”

She wondered if it was in her blood, her cells, her DNA, this inability to be satisfied with what she had.

Art is the result of facing almost no survival pressure at all. It’s the product of leisure time. Our big brains, the most complex instruments known in the universe, have been released from the vigilance of evading predators and seeking sustenance, permitting our imagination to gambol and explore, to dream while awake, to share visions of God. Art signals our freedom. It exists because we’ve won the evolutionary war.

Each person does the amount of lying that is right for them. You have to know yourself and fulfill the amount of untruth that your constitution requires.

What if, temperamentally, your friend and rival was simply better equipped for success?

It was her way of drawing a line between them and herself, playing the observer so she didn’t have to care whether or not she fit in. She’d been doing it all her life. Andrew said she was like this because she was a writer, but he had that backward; she was a writer because she was like this.

Make believe you are glad when you’re sorry.

But the randomness that can kill you will also save you.

Of course if you’re knitting for years the sweater eventually becomes so huge that it simply can’t be hidden.

Why have I spent so long settling for less when I know damn well the world expects more?