Poetry

There is not a particle of life that does not bear poetry within it.

--Gustave Flaubert

Mystery

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious - the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”

     -- Albert Einstein

Needs

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”

     -- Philip Pullman

Secrets

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”

     -- Stephen King, Different Seasons

Freedom

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

     -- Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Letting Go

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”

     -- Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

In the Zone

“The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.”

-- Robert Henri