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Art Quote by A.S. Byatt

“Those words . . . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation.” quote by A.S. Byatt — Download Open image

““Those words . . . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation.””

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Art History Identity Individual Nation

More by A.S. Byatt

“...bleached by darkness”

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“Above his head at street level, he saw an angled aileron of a scarlet Porsche, its jaunty fin more or less at the upper edge of his window frame. A pair of very soft, clean glistening black shoes appeared, followed by impeccably creased matt charcoal pinstriped light woollen legs, followed by the beautifully cut lower hem of a jacket, its…

“Why do you go cold?" He kept his voice gentle. "I - I've analysed it. Because I have the sort of good looks I have. People treat you as a kind of ;possession; if you have a certain sort of good looks. Not lively, but sort of clear-cut and-" "Beautiful." "Yes, why not. You can become a property or an…

“She was a thinking child, and worked this out. It hurt her, unlike most knowledge, which was strength and pleasure.”

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“All these are true and none. The place is there Is what we name it, and is not. It is .”

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“He had been taught that language was essentially inadequate, that it could never speak what was there, that it only spoke itself. He thought about the death mask. He could and could not say that the mask and the man were dead. What had happened to him was that the ways in which it could be said had become more…

“ We must come to grief and regret anyway - and I for one would rather regret the reality than its phantasm, knowledge than…

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“Roland had learned to see himself, theoretically, as a crossing-place for a number of systems, all loosely connected. He had been trained to see his idea of his 'self' as an illusion, to be replaced by a discontinuous machinery and electrical message-network of various desires, ideological beliefs and responses, language-forms and hormones and pheromones. Mostly he liked this. He had…

“She thought human thoughts and stone thoughts. The latter were slow, patchily coloured, textured and extreme, both hot and cold. They did not translate…

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“…it will be possible, in the time of the wolf, to kill the gods.”

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“She looked, quickly, quickly, it was better than before, thanked him and averted her eyes. She came to trust him with her disintegration.”

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“This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will be the…

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True works of art contain their own theory and give us the measurement according to which we should judge them.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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Before Noah, men having only water to drink, could not find the truth. Accordingly...they became abominably wicked, and they were justly exterminated by the water they loved to drink. This good man, Noah, having seen that all his contemporaries had perished by this unpleasant drink, took a dislike to it; and God, to relieve his dryness, created the vine and…

Benjamin Franklin

“Hear the sum of the whole matter in the compass of one brief word — every art possessed by man comes from Prometheus.”

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I think most artists feel like they're outside society - no matter how many accolades they receive, or how much money is in your…

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The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.

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That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

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“So, really," continued Jacob as if this were perfectly normal to expound on art in these circumstances, "when you think about it, the artists who make people stop and think, who push the form, who make you uncomfortable, who are laughable, well, they're the ones who get remembered." Idly, Jacob dug a hole in the snow with his shovel and…

Justina Chen Headley

“There are two options in art; either to adopt philosophical life by dissecting art, or to write your own philosophical life and claim it…

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The house has to serve comfort. The work of art is revolutionary; the house is conservative.

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During human progress, every science is evolved out of its corresponding art.

Herbert Spencer

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In literature and art memory is a synonym for invention. It is the life-blood of imagination, which faints and dies when the veins are…

Robert Aris Willmott

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I think a business guy is different from an artist. They walk different paths. Artists create the best outputs when they're having fun. And…

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