Light-skinned-ed Girl

On Childhood

"So like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us." - Gaston Bachelard

On the Artist's Alienation

 

"I am suggesting . . . that you see your pain with its integrity.  I am not saying that you should accept it, or dwell or indulge in it; I am saying you should see it, just as you can see the sunrise or the sunset.  Your pain can be a source, like the color blue, or orange for that matter.  It can be one of your colors; it can be a tool."  Anna Deveare Smith, from Letters to a Young Artist

Toni Morrison Interview in Poets & Writers Magazine

"All of that  art-for-art's-sake stuff is BS . . . What are these people talking about?  Are you really telling me that Shakespeare and Aeschylus weren't writing about kings?  All good art is political!  There is none that isn't . . . We've just dirtied the word 'politics,' made it sound like it's unpatriotic or something . . . My point is that it has to be both: beautiful and political at the same time.  I'm not interested in art that is not in the world.  And it's not just the narrative, it's not just the story; it's the language and the structure and what's going on behind it.  Anybody can make up a story."  - Toni Morrison

You can only find the complete interview in the print edition of Poets & Writers Nov/Dec 2008.  Morrison's new novel, A Mercy, about the Mixed experience in seventeenth century Virginia, will be in bookstores in November.  I can't wait!

The Importance of the Writer

"The importance of the writer is continuous;  his importance, I think is that he is here to describe things which other people are too busy to describe . . . It's a very difficult thing to do, it's a very special thing to do and people who do it cannot by that token do many other things.  But their importance is, and the importance of writers in this country now is this, that this country is yet to be discovered in any real sense . . . Without having anything whatever against Cadillacs, refrigerators, or all the paraphernalia of American life, I yet suspect that there is something much more important and much more real which produces the Cadillac, refrigerator, atom bomb, and what produces it, afterall, is something which we don't seem to want to look at, and that is the person . . . A country is only as strong as the people who make it up and the country turns into what the people want it to become . . . We made the world we're living in and we have to make it over."  - James Baldwin, "Notes for a Hypothetical Novel"

On Consistency

"As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency." --John Cage, composer

On Wishes

"Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change."  - Marcel Proust

Photo by Carol Schultz

On Planning

“The more you let yourself be distracted from where you are going, the more you are the person that you are. It's not so much like getting lost as it is like getting found.” --William Stafford

Photo Don.Ho

On Joy

"That's joy, it's always
a recognition, the known
appearing fully itself, and
more itself than one knew."

--Denise Levertov (poet)

On Fragility

"Why wouldn't someone want to feel fragile?  I think fragility is one of the most underrated things as a human being . . . I mean we are fragile, and we're living in a society where we could easily be destroyed--psychologially, emotionally, and physically--so why shouldn't we feel fragile?  Life is on a silk thread hanging like a cocoon from a tree, and it's a fragile thing.  I don't think yoga is to keep you from feeling fragile.  I think it's to enable you to be consciously fragile but still feel like 'I'm fine with this fragility.'" - Rodney Yee

Photo by OanaRayne

Note to Self . . .

    I make art foranyone whos forgot what it feels like

to put up a fight . . .

--from a Kara Walker (artist) index card

Photo by Lorena Alvarez.