Proscenium Quotes & Sayings

The walls were draped with banners covered with cabalistic signs, an abundance of owls of all kinds, scarabs and ibises, and Oriental divinities of uncertain origin. Near the rear wall was a dais, a proscenium of burning torches held up by rough logs, and in the background an altar with a triangular altarpiece and statuettes of Isis and Osiris. The room was ringed by an amphitheater of figures of Anubis, and there was a portrait of Cagliostro (it could hardly have been of anyone else, could it?), a gilded mummy in Cheops format, two five-armed candelabra, a gong suspended from two rampant snakes, on a podium a lectern covered by calico printed with hieroglyphics, and two crowns, two tripods, a little portable sarcophagus, a throne, a fake seventeenth-century fauteuil, four unmatched chairs suitable for a banquet with the sheriff of Nottingham, and candles, tapers, votive lights, all flickering very spiritually. — Umberto Eco

They were in a trench sliding through a forest of corn. Machine stood over the rows, black girders that arced in the sky like the proscenium above a stage. The thought occurred to Wayne that those machines were sprayers, full of poison. They would drench the corn in a lethal rain to keep it from being eaten by invasive species. Those exact words - "invasive species" - rang through his brain. Later the corn would be lightly washed and people would eat it. — Joe Hill

Beware, my body and my soul, beware above all of crossing your arms and assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of griefs is not a proscenium, and a man who wails is not a dancing bear. — Aime Cesaire

What I can't tell with a photo I will tell with a painting, and what I can't tell with a painting I will tell with a video or text sometimes, et cetera. — Francis Alys

And if all I know how to do is speak, it is for you that I shall speak. My lips shall speak for miseries that have no mouth, my voice shall be the liberty of those who languish in the dungeon of despair ... And above all my body as well as my soul, beware of folding your arms in the sterile attitude of spectator, for life is not a spectacle, for a sea of pain is not a proscenium. — Aime Cesaire

As Narrative (Novel, Passion), love is a story which is accomplished, in the sacred sense of the word: it is a program which must be completed. For me, on the contrary, this story has already taken place; for what is event is exclusively the delight of which I have been the object and whose aftereffects I repeat (and fail to achieve). Enamoration is a drama, if we restore to this word the archaic meaning Nietzsche gives it: "Ancient drama envisioned great declamatory scenes, which excluded action (action took place before or behind the stage)." Amorous seduction (a pure hypnotic moment) takes place before discourse and behind the proscenium of consciousness: the amorous "event" is of a hieratic order: it is my own local legend, my little sacred history that I declaim to myself, and this declamation of a fait accompli (frozen, embalmed, removed from any praxis) is the lover's discourse. — Roland Barthes

Shadow boxes become poetic theater or settings wherein are metamorphosed the elements of a childhood pastime. The fragile, shimmering globules become the shimmering but more enduring planets - a connotation of moon and tides - the association of water less subtle, as when driftwood pieces make up a proscenium to set off the dazzling white of sea foam and billowy cloud crystallized in a pipe of fancy. — Joseph Cornell

Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral. — Kahlil Gibran

The camera lens or the television camera is still just a proscenium arch. And as a great old character actor once said to me, wherever you're acting, you reach up and take hold of the proscenium arch, and you pull it down around your shoulders. — Robert Preston

Geologists on the whole are inconsistent drivers. When a roadcut presents itself, they tend to lurch and weave. To them, the roadcut is a portal, a fragment of a regional story, a proscenium arch that leads their imaginations into the earth and through the surrounding terrane. — John McPhee

An exquisite dulcet epithalame of most mollificative suadency for juveniles amatory whom the odoriferous flambeaus of the paranymphs have escorted to the quadrupedal proscenium of connubial communion. — James Joyce

Once we lose our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe which dwarfs
in time, in space, and in potential
the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors. — Carl Sagan

John XXI was a very great pope and he's the one who actually corrected the liturgy. He did so because of his friend Jules Isaac, a French Jewish historian who was a friend of John Paul, of John 23rd, and he convinced him and he changed the liturgy, no more Jew, the perfidious Jew and so forth and now, and don't speak any more of the Jews killing Christ. Things have changed. — Elie Wiesel

When I'm writing it's as if I'm the observer. It's as if that computer screen there -it used to be the typewriter - just kind of dissolves and there's this whirling tunnel of mist and there's a kind of proscenium arch, and then there are my characters, and they say what they say, and I laugh sometimes in surprise at what they say. — Richard Bach

As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well, as it turned out, I never wrote a great novel, sadly, and I never converted to Catholicism, happily, but I did do one thing he did. That is, in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be. — Julie Burchill

Many of my short fictions use theatre as a metaphor for situations in which characters find themselves estranged from the larger, uncontrollable world that may or may not lie beyond the proscenium arch. — Norman Lock

There is much virtue in a window. It is to a human being as a frame is to a painting, as a proscenium to a play, as 'form' to literature. It strongly defines its content. — Max Beerbohm

It is part," Rollo writes home to the elder Dr. Groast in Lancashire, in elaborate revenge for childhood tales of Jenny Greenteeth waiting out in the fens to drown him, "part of an old and clandestine drama for which the human body serves only as a set of very allusive, often cryptic programme-notes- it's as if the body we can measure is a scrap of this programme found outside in the street, near a magnificent stone theatre we cannot enter. The convolutions of language denied us! the great Stage, even darker than Mr Tyrone Guthrie's accustomed murk ... Gilt and mirroring, red velvet, tier on tier of box seats all in shadows too, as somewhere down in that deep proscenium, deeper than geometries we know of, the voices utter secrets we are never told ... — Thomas Pynchon

Beware of crossing your arms in the sterile attitude of the spectator, because life is not a spectacle, because a a sea of sorrows is not a proscenium, because a man who screams is not a dancing bear. — Aime Cesaire

Behind the proscenium arch, you can't always hear what people in the audience are saying. — Billy Connolly

But just when I thought I was going to get away, the creaky machinery of his face began to grind and a cardboard dawn of recognition was lowered, with jerks, from the dusty proscenium. — Donna Tartt

All art is dependent on technology because it's a human endeavour, so even when you're using charcoal on a wall or designed the proscenium arch, that's technology. — George Lucas

One of the reasons I love to come to Paris is because the decorative arts are so refined that I am always walking through one proscenium into another frame. — Ralph Gibson

Riding in another drop, ain't talking Enterprise
They try to see me, get diabetes from humble pie — Wale

It's quite different, the kind of love you get in a smaller club and the kind of love you get on a big proscenium stage. It's quite different. I like both of them, but I'm in love with the smaller, intimate club. — Nickolas Ashford

Birds fly and fish swim and I do this. — B.J. Penn

It is indubitable that a 50-year-old mathematician knows the mathematics he learned at 20 or 30, but has only notions, often rather vague, of the mathematics of his epoch, i.e. the period of time when he is 50. — Jean Dieudonne

The basic success of the conga came from ... that basic principle of African music and dance: everybody participates. The conga eradicated the distinction between performer and audience, broke down the wall of the proscenium ... — Ned Sublette

Hesitating at the last instant, she gazed back at Vesper, and tears brimmed in her eyes as she murmured in a meek voice, "Good-bye, my love." Then she returned to the enchanted device and called out, "May this new vessel serve you well! — Robin Jarvis

A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis. The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared, you are both in that parenthesis. It's like a proscenium arch for a dialogue. — John Berger

Opposites generally create intense chemistry. There are more chances of fireworks when different people are together than similar personalities. — Sonam Kapoor