“Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun of eating it all over again.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
Rome Italy
Tiny, a photograph
“Once we lose our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe which dwarfs — in time, in space, and in potential — the tiny anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot
Guitar, a photograph
“The guitar is a miniature orchestra in itself.”
― Ludwig van Beethoven
Technological sublime, a photograph
“For thousands of years, it had been nature–and its supposed creator–that had had a monopoly on awe. It had been the icecaps, the deserts, the volcanoes and the glaciers that had given us a sense of finitude and limitation and had elicited a feeling in which fear and respect coagulated into a strangely pleasing feeling of humility, a feeling which the philosophers of the eighteenth century had famously termed the sublime.
But then had come a transformation to which we were still the heirs…. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the dominant catalyst for that feeling of the sublime had ceased to be nature. We were now deep in the era of the technological sublime when awe could most powerfully be invoked not by forests or icebergs but by supercomputers, rockets and particle accelerators. We were now almost exclusively amazed by ourselves.”
― Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
Creative, a photograph of life
“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that
without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.”
― Pearl S. Buck
Art, a photograph of the MAXXI Gallery
“Architecture is the alpha principle of all arts.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Today I visited the MAXXI gallery for the Letizia Battaglia exhibit. The oddly out-of-place modern exterior architecture of the MAXXI aside, the interior exhibit space is superb. And as a lover of photography and photo-journalism, I cannot recommend the exhibit enough. I must’ve spent at least three hours in awe at her work, not only in photographs, but her publishing house dedicated solely to women writers.
People, a photograph
“Religion. It’s given people hope in a world torn apart by religion.”
― Jon Stewart
One Street Shy 