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Quotes

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.

—George Eliot, c. 1872

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

—W.H. Auden, c. 1940

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

—G.C. Lichtenberg, c. 1780

Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art—that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

—Tennessee Williams, 1944

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1887
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