"When the equilibrium of a self-regulating system is reminded of the slow death in which it is suspended, the motor may falter."
Anne Carson
from the Roni Horn project Wonderwater (Alice Offshore)

"In the warmer months of the year one or other of those nocturnal insects quite often strays indoors from the small garden behind my house. When I get up early in the morning, I find them clinging to the wall, motionless. I believe, said Austerlitz, they know they have lost their way, since if you do not put them out again carefully they will stay where they are, never moving, until the last breath is out of their bodies, and indeed they will remain in the place where they came to grief even after death, held fast by the tiny claws that stiffened in their last agony, until a draft of air detaches them and blows them into a dusty corner. Sometimes, seeing one of these moths that have met their end in my house, I wonder what kind of fear and pain they feel while they are lost."
from Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald

The Point of Suspension, 11x17
now in the collection of
Laura Brown & Staphanie Fosburg
Washingotn, DC

"I put down the cup and examine my own mind. It alone can discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day."
from Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust

"There are no facts, only interpretations."
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"...much of our life may be lived by our instincts. Perhaps the conscious mental representations are afterthoughts- ideas thought after the deed to provide us with the illusion of power and control."
from When Nietzsche Wept by Irving Yalom

"The world is full of abandoned meanings."
from White Noise by Don DeLillo

"If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything."
Mark Twain

"You'll see in time. There's no running away," Kaddish said. "If you do, when you're old it's much worse. You'll forget your name. You'll forget what you're saying as the words come out of your mouth. Then, without anything left, you'll remember who you are and you'll find yourself afraid and alone among strangers. Better to struggle at home."
from The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander

"The will is a link which connects the soul to the world as-it-is. Through the will the soul frees itself from distraction and mere dreams."
from Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow

Atmospheric Disturbance, 11x17"
now in the collection of
Greg Harlin, Annapolis, MD

"Here's what I think Mr. Wind-Up Bird," said May Kasahara. "Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can't seem to do it. They just don't get it. Of course, the problem could be that I'm not explaining it very well, but I think it's because they're not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they're not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do crazy things."
from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

"I write because I want to end my loneliness." Jonathan Safran Foer

"...two kinds of loneliness...of absolute solitude- the physical fact of living alone, working alone, as I have always done. This need not be painful, for many writers it's necessary...Being alone for most of the day means you listen to different rhythms, which are not determined by other people...But there's another kind of loneliness which is terrible to endure...and that is the loneliness of seeing a different world than that of the people around you. Their lives remote from yours. You can see the gulf and they can't. You live among them. They walk on earth. You walk on glass. They reassure themselves with conformity, with carefully constructed resemblances. You are masked, aware of your absolute difference."
from Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker

"To crave and to have are like a thing and its shadow."
from Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

"...that single moment when you truly touch another person...within the point which is a very brief thing (not enough time for your heart to beat) two human beings are one. The speaker and the listener, the writer and the reader, the man who bleeds and the man who makes him, they are the same things. They are alive."
from So I Am Glad by A.L. Kennedy

"Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only be successful if the surrender is mutual."
Octavio Paz

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."
Anais Nin

Bingo, 11x17"

"What is the moral of Applebroog's stories. It's impossible to say. We don't know how they will come out. In part this results from a refusal on her part to provide happy endings as an inducement to endure the stress of paying attention. In part this results from the fact that these scenarios describe a society, and unlike stories centering on individual fates, societies do not offer dramatic closure but instead guarantee a constant change in the imbalance of forces that define their character. The flaws in the character of America are revealed by what Applebroog does in the context of its compensatory fantasies. The satisfactions to be derived from their unresolved antagonism are the awkward satisfactions of living without illusions in the midst of the illusions we cherish most."
Robert Storr about Ida Applebroog

"There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say "It is yet more difficult than you thought." This is the muse of form. It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey."
Wendell Berry

"To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes."
Akira Kurosawa

"Sometimes it seems to me that the curtain is about to lift which separates me from my work, from the way my work now must be. I have a sense of something imminent coming closer. But then I lose it again, become ordinary and inadequate. I feel like someone who is trying to guess an object being described by music. The sound grows steadily louder; he thinks he is on the point of grasping it, and then the sound becomes weaker again and he has to look for another answer."
Kathe Kollwitz

"It's not so much where my motivation comes from but how it manages to survive."
Louise Bourgeois

"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."
Sylvia Plath

"Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible."
Frank Zappa

Attraction, 11x17"

"...the sense of possibility could be defined as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not."
from A Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil

"Living by the rules is another way of hoping the future will be like the past."
Adam Phillips

"Creativity is a form of love that expresses itself as the urge to clarify and share with others what it holds dear."
Vincent Boke

"One who is self controlled is awake when it appears night to all other beings, and what appears to him as night keeps all others awake."
from The Bhagavad Gita

"You do not need to leave your room.
Remain sitting at your table and listen.
Do not even listen, simply wait.
Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked,
it has no choice,
it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."
Franz Kafka from Aphorisms (#109)