Looking at Monet’s late masterpieces is like looking at a grand Chinese landscape: the cosmos seems to be constantly vanishing and appearing in front of you.
Much of what we call ‘modernist’ painting was an attempt to find ways of making space that were different from either the space of a photograph or linear perspective.
All pictures are, in one way or another, time machines. That is, they condense the appearance of something – a person, a scene, a sequence – and preserve it. It takes a certain amount of time to make them. And it also takes time to look at them, varying from a second to a lifetime.
Dong Qichang held that it was through depictions of landscape that an educated man could show his understanding of the principles of nature. This was art as a spiritual exercise.
The main reason why pictures, and other things, survive is because someone loves them.
Two dimensions don’t really exist in nature. A surface only looks two dimensional because of our scale. If you were a little fly, a canvas or even a piece of paper would seem quite irregular, whereas to us, some things can be seen as flat. What’s really flat in nature?
Reality is a slippery concept, because it is not separate from us. Reality is in our minds.
Art doesn’t progress. Some of the best pictures were the first ones.
It was exhilarating. It was glorious. It was more than I had imagined. At the same time, it was all entirely logical. All of it followed inexorably and irrefutably from the few laws I had laid down. I had to do nothing but sit back and watch as the cosmos unfolded in time.
Wouldn’t the beauty have more meaning with other minds to admire it? Wouldn’t it be transformed by other minds? I’m not talking about a passive admiration of beauty, but a participation in that beauty, in which everyone is enlarged.
The progression of time along a developmental path was a concept foreign to Native Americans until the Europeans forced them into history.
You should have changed if you wanted to remain yourself but you were afraid to change.
But race is the child of racism, not the father.
I have never believed the brothers who claim to “run,” much less “own,” the city. We did not design the streets. We do not fund them. We do not preserve them.
It was a calm December day. Families, believing themselves white, were out on the streets. Infants, raised to be white, were bundled in strollers.
Poetry aims for an economy of truth—loose and useless words must be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts.
So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope.
The Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers.
The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my neighborhood, in their large rings and medallions, their big puffy coats and full-length fur-collared leathers, which was their armor against their world. They would stand on the corner of Gwynn Oak and Liberty, or Cold Spring and Park Heights, or outside Mondawmin Mall, with their hands dipped in Russell sweats. I think back on those boys now and all I see is fear, and all I see is them girding themselves against the ghosts of the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered ’round their grandfathers so that the branches of the black body might be torched, then cut away. The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T-shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired.
The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority.
There was before you, and then there was after, and in this after, you were the God I’d never had.
There was no golden era when evildoers did their business and loudly proclaimed it as such.
Why were only our heroes nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in especial need of this morality.
Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.
Events are triggered by other events, not by time.