Dissanayake Quotes & Sayings

I drive back into town with the two crinkly notes in my pocket and wonder if I could support a family this way, doomed to play dinner dances until I too have one foot in the grave. I shudder at the possibility, and think about poor Meg in her sickbed. What am I going to do? On the way back I pass a big roundabout at the end of the Coast Road. It is March, and the roundabout is covered in daffodils. I circle it twice, an idea forming in my head. I park in a nearby street. It is early morning and there is no one around. I check for police cars and head across the road to the roundabout. Half an hour later I let myself into Megan's flat and slowly open her bedroom door. My arms are full of daffodils, maybe a hundred all told, their drooping yellow trumpets lighting up the entire room. Meg starts to cry, and so do I. The next morning our prayers are answered, but our relief is mixed with a subtle, unspoken regret. — Sting

In every human society of which we know - prehistoric, ancient or modern, whether hunter-gatherer, pastoral, agricultural or industrial - at least some form of art is displayed, and not only displayed, but highly regarded and willingly engaged in. — Ellen Dissanayake

I suggest that what artists do in all media can be summarized as deliberately performing the operations that occur instinctively during a ritualized behaviour: they simplify or formalize, repeat (sometimes with variation), exaggerate, and elaborate in both space and time for the purpose of attracting attention and provoking and manipulating emotional response. — Ellen Dissanayake

We can begin a discussion of artmaking by noting that from very early (as long ago as 200,000 years), humans have been naturally attracted to the extraordinary as a dimension of experience and that at some point they seem also to have been moved to make the ordinary extraordinary-that is, to shape or elaborate everyday, mundane reality and thereby transform it into something special, different from the everyday. — Ellen Dissanayake

I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the Whites. There scarcely ever was a civilization of their complexion, nor even any individual, eminent either in action or speculation. — David Hume

An acquaintance of mine, a notary by profession, who, by perpetual writing, began first to complain of an excessive wariness of his whole right arm which could be removed by no medicines, and which was at last succeeded by a perfect palsy of the whole arm ... He learned to write with his left hand, which was soon thereafter seized with the same disorder. — Bernardino Ramazzini

Football is the poetry of a motion. — Pubudu Lasal Dissanayake

What you are looking to create is a positive, happy life: the more you intend that your thoughts are positive and happy, the more that is what you will create. — Tony Burroughs

Dissanayake writes that art that engages the mind and hands, that is not just passive connoisseurship, can act as an antidote, for our contentious and alienated relationship to our own societies. — David Byrne

Becky!" I had to laugh. "You're worse than me! It's no wonder he's such an egomaniac."
"What? You're telling me you can say no to that face?"
I wanted to say yes, but it would have been a lie and we all knew it. — Kelly Oram

Art is a normal and necessary behavior of human beings and like other common and universal occupations such as talking, working, exercising, playing, socializing, learning, loving, and caring, should be recognized, encouraged and developed in everyone. Via art, experience is heightened, elevated, made more memorable and significant — Ellen Dissanayake