Quotations

"They're not particular whether you're playing a flat 5th or a ruptured 129th as long as they can dance."

— Dizzy Gillespie, American trumpet player, born 1917

"These things I know: how the living go on living and how the dead go on living with them so that in a forest even a dead tree casts a shadow and the leaves fall one by one and the branches break in the wind and the bark peels off slowly and the trunk cracks and the rain seeps in through the cracks and the trunk fall to the ground and the moss covers it and in the spring the rabbits find it and build their nest inside the dead tree so that nothing is wasted in nature or in love."

— Laura Gilpin, American photographer, born 1950

"The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does."

— Allen Ginsberg, American poet, born 1926

"Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness."

— Allen Ginsberg, American poet, born 1926

"I believe that we are put here in human form to decipher the hieroglyphs of love and suffering. And, there is no degree of love or intensity of feeling that does not bring with it the possibility of a crippling hurt. But, it is a duty to take that risk and love without reserve or defense."

— Allen Ginsberg, American poet, born 1926

"America, why are your libraries full of tears?"

— Allen Ginsberg, American poet, born 1926

"This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished, for you, my love, my loss, my lesion, a rosary of words to count out time's illusions, all the minutes, hours, days the calendar compounds as if the past existed somewhere like an inheritance still waiting to be claimed."

— Dana Gioia, American poet, born 1950

"What we conceal Is always more than what we dare confide. Think of the letters that we write our dead."

— Dana Gioia, American poet, born 1950

"Sadness flies on the wings of the morning and out of the heart of darkness comes the light."

— Jean Giraudoux, French novelist, born 1882

"Never get caught acting."

— Lillian Gish, American actress, died February 27, 1993

"I've never been in style, so I can't go out of style."

— Lillian Gish, American actress, born October 14, 1893

"During a visit to his studio, where the front door bears the motto “Art Is Work,” Mr. Glaser smiled when asked why he kept working. Upstairs, he and Clay Felker started New York magazine in 1968; on another floor, he once had 30-odd workers designing displays for Grand Union supermarkets. You really want an answer? he said. It’s the greatest source of pleasure in my life. I am so thrilled by making something that didn’t exist before. There’s nothing, nothing even close. I never go to the theater, I never go to concerts, I no longer go to movies. I don’t do anything except work. It’s like magic. I also think there’s an opportunity to do good. Not in a moralistic sense, but to feel that you’re a part of something larger than yourself. But that’s not really why I do it. I do it because it is so pleasurable for me. I derive this deep, deep satisfaction that nothing else, including sex, has ever given me. It’s the reason I’m here, is to do the work. And I’m so happy that I can still do it well."

— Milton Glaser, American graphic designer, born 1929

"You learn more and more that everything exists at once with its opposite, so the contradictions of life are never-ending and somehow the mediation between these opposites is the game of life."

— Milton Glaser, American graphic designer, born 1929

"The point was that the world of music—its language, beauty, and mystery—was already urging itself on me. Some shift had already begun. Music was no longer a metaphor for the real world somewhere out there. It was becoming the opposite. The “out there” stuff was the metaphor and the real part was, and is to this day, the music."

— Philip Glass, American composer, born 1937