Aesthetic Distance Quotes & Sayings

Patriotism has served, at different times, as widely different ends as a razor, which ought to be used in keeping your face clean and yet may be used to cut your own throat or that of an innocent person. — Charles Edward Montague

I'm seeing people float further and further away from the idea and the culture that we tried to create, and it really pisses me off. — Seth Troxler

Sometimes gaining and losing are more intimately related than we like to think. And some things cannot be moved or owned. Some light does not make it all the way through the atmosphere, but scatters ... The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel. If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not ... abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway ... Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant. — Rebecca Solnit

General state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. By — George Orwell

Critical art is an art that aims to produce a new perception of the world, and therefore to create a commitment to its transformation. This schema, very simple in appearance, is actually the conjunction of three processes: first, the production of a sensory form of 'strangeness'; second, the development of an awareness of the reason for that strangeness and third, a mobilization of individuals as a result of that awareness. — Jacques Ranciere

Just met a boy, just met a boy when he could become my little problem. — Nicki Minaj

He was no longer my professor, no longer someone I loathed. He was hands I needed on my body, lips I wanted kissing mine. — Chanel Cleeton

The time you spent on earth and what you did with your life may be of great importance to you; what matters most to God is where you go from here. Are you sure of your destination? — Felix Wantang

Artaud sought to remove aesthetic distance, bringing the audience into direct contact with the dangers of life. By turning theatre into a place where the spectator is exposed rather than protected, Artaud was committing an act of cruelty upon them. — Antonin Artaud

Even now I remember those pictures, like pictures in a storybook one loved as a child. Radiant meadows, mountains vaporous in the trembling distance; leaves ankle-deep on a gusty autumn road; bonfires and fog in the valleys; cellos, dark window-panes, snow. — Donna Tartt

Just you and me and forever. — A.L. Jackson

New York is in my soul. — Julian Casablancas

Alarmed, I looked at him, then the road, then at him again. — Kim Harrison

She told me I couldn't just put on a leather jacket and think I was rock'n'roll, I had to live it."
Burt about Bex, Book 1 "Making it — Jamie Scallion

When history seems to offer no sanctuary for values (when history is assailed by wars and inhuman or immoral public actions), literature can provide a model, often as horrendous as that of history, but one which by virtue of its fictional nature is bound to keep an ironic, parodic, aesthetic or philosophical distance from what is at risk in immediate experience or direct reflection. — Beatriz Sarlo

But my research had taught me that the tissue of contradictions that was my personality was itself, at best, a poem, where "poem" is understood as referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures; only then could my fraudulence be a project and not merely a pathology; only then could my distance from myself be redescribed as critical, aesthetic, as opposed to a side effect of what experts might call my substance problem, felicitous phrase, the origins of which lay not in my desire to evade reality, but in my desire to have a chemical excuse for reality's unavailability. — Ben Lerner

It had been in a Paris house, with many people around, and my dear friend Jules Darboux, wishing to do me a refined aesthetic favor, had touched my sleeve and said, "I want you to meet-" and led me to Nina, who sat in the corner of a couch, her body folded Z-wise, with an ashtray at her heel, and she took a long turquoise cigarette holder from her lips and joyfully, slowly exclaimed, "Well, of all people-" and then all evening my heart felt like breaking, as I passed from group to group with a sticky glass in my fist, now and then looking at her from a distance (she did not look ... ), and listening to scraps of conversation, and overheard one man saying to another, "Funny, how they all smell alike, burnt leaf through whatever perfume they use, those angular dark-haired girls," and as it often happens, a trivial remark related to some unknown topic coiled and clung to one's own intimate recollection, a parasite of its sadness. — Vladimir Nabokov

Of silence, I can say only what I have heard, that all things are known by that which they make or leave
and so speech isn't itself, but its effect, and silence is the same. — Jesse Ball