“There are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.”―Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
“Some days you’re the pigeon, and some days you’re the statue.” ―Scott Adams, Dilbert
“Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.” ―Joseph Campbell
EM·BLEM (noun \ˈem-bləm\)
1: a picture with a motto or set of verses intended as a moral lesson
2: an object or the figure of an object symbolizing and suggesting another object or an idea
3 a : a symbolic object used as a heraldic device b : a device, symbol, or figure adopted and used as an identifying mark
“Literature’s Most Notoriously Incomprehensible Classics” Flavorwire
“Celebrated Marbelized Image in Tristram Shandy Inspires Fundraising Auction” The Guardian
NBCC Reads: Favorite Comic Novels
Emblem of My Work (an art project for the Laurence Sterne Trust)
“…the motley emblem of my work…” - Laurence Sterne on the marbelized image that replaces page 169 of Tristram Shandy
“Nothing can be made out of nothing.” - William Shakespeare, King Lear
“Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.” ―David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
“The grotesques were not all horrible. Some were amusing, some almost beautiful, and one, a woman all drawn out of shape, hurt the old man by her grotesqueness. When she passed he made a noise like a small dog whimpering. Had you come into the room you might have supposed the old man had unpleasant dreams or perhaps indigestion.” ―Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg Ohio
“Sometimes losing a pet is more painful than losing a human because in the case of the pet, you were not pretending to love it.” ―Amy Sedaris, Simple Times
“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.” ―Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
(Source: monstersupplies.org)
“Consider this your rallying cry. Reclaim your rightful positions as catalysts of progress. Rise up against the pencil pushers with unworked hands and uncurious minds. Go to your drawing boards and draft tables and work stations. Prepare to design things that matter. Prepare to change the way the world makes things. Prepare to redesign the making of making.”
“Somebody gets into trouble, gets out of it again. People love that story! They never get sick of it.” ―Kurt Vonnegut
Literary Paint Chips (The Paris Review)
“I present a fine case of colored hearing. Perhaps ‘hearing’ is not quite accurate, since the color sensations seem to be produced by the very act of my orally forming a given letter while I imagine its outline. The long a of the English alphabet (and it is this alphabet I have in mind farther on unless otherwise stated) has for me the tint of weathered wood, but the French a evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard g (vulcanized rubber) and r (a sooty rag being ripped). Oatmeal n, noodle-limp l, and the ivory-backed hand mirror ofo take care of the whites. I am puzzled by my French on which I see as the brimming tension-surface of alcohol in a small glass…The confessions of a synesthete must sound tedious and pretentious to those who are protected from such leakings and drafts by more solid walls than mine are.” ―Vladmir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.” ―Maurice Sendak
![“Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession…Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, [people use] the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.” ―Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2qk5z3aRk1qj541no1_500.jpg)
“Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession…Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, [people use] the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.” ―Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel
“Clocks slay time… time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.” ―William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
“In writing, you must kill your darlings.” ―William Faulkner
