Does writing poetry make you brave? It is a good question to ask. I think making anything is a brave thing to do. Not like fighting brave, obviously. But a kind that looks at a horrible situation and doesn’t crumble. Making anything assumes there’s a world worth making it for.
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Chagall on Stained Glass
For me a stained glass window is a transparent partition between my heart and the heart of the world. Stained glass has to be serious and passionate. It is something elevating and exhilarating. It has to live through the perception of light. To read the Bible is to perceive a certain light, and the window has to make this obvious through its simplicity and grace.
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Jules Kaye on a Child’s Experience of the World
When I was a little younger than you, I used to think that the world was made up of big people and little people; and that's the way it would always stay. And then I always wondered why sinks were too high and you had to climb up to wash your face. Cupboards, too high. The hole in the toilet was too big. Nothing, nothing was made for us. It was just a world of big people and little people. You never got any older and nobody ever died.
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Ted Chiang on The Lover of Beauty vs. The Lover of Humanity
Reynolds hasn't witnessed the beauty that I have; he's stood before lovely insights, oblivious to them. The sole gestalt that inspires him is the one I ignored: that of the planetary society, of the biosphere. I am a lover of beauty, he of humanity. Each feels that the other has ignored great opportunities.