Quotations

"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

"At the next meal, I was head server—tears were pouring down my face as I served... and afterwards, when I went out of the Zen do, there was a tree there, and looking at the tree, I didn't feel I was the tree; it went deeper than that. I felt the birds on me, all separation was completely gone."

— Bernard Glassman, American Zen Buddhist roshi, born 1939

"I always have this red nose in my pocket, and if it looks like I'm taking things too seriously, or the person I'm talking to is taking them too seriously, I put the nose on. It doesn't matter what we're doing or talking about, it doesn't matter if we agree or disagree, the nose changes everything."

— Bernard Glassman, American Zen Buddhist roshi, born 1939

"I don't know what you could say about a day in which you have seen four beautiful sunsets."

— John Glenn, American astronaut, born 1921

"If there is one thing I’ve learned in my years on this planet, it’s that the happiest and most fulfilled people I’ve known are those who devoted themselves to something bigger and more profound than merely their own self interest."

— John Glenn, American astronaut, born 1921

"I hope the seeds I have sown will be taken up by those who will follow me because the journey I have begun cannot be undertaken in isolation."

— Evelyn Glennie, Scottish virtuoso percussionist, born 1965

"We have to be that wedge that drives the question and asks the hard questions."

— Danny Glover, American actor, born July 22, 1946

"Even before you touched me, I belonged to you; all you had to do was look at me."

— Louise Gluck, American poet, born 1943

"I’m like the child who buries her head in the pillow so as not to see, the child who tells herself that light causes sadness."

— Louise Gluck, American poet, born 1943

"Intense love always leads to mourning."

— Louise Gluck, American poet, born 1943

"It seems to me that the desire to make art produces an ongoing experience of longing, a restlessness sometimes, but not inevitably, played out romantically, or sexually. Always there seems something ahead, the next poem or story, visible, at least, apprehensible, but unreachable. To perceive it at all is to be haunted by it; some sound, some tone, becomes a torment — the poem embodying that sound seems to exist somewhere already finished. It’s like a lighthouse, except that, as one swims towards it, it backs away."

— Louise Gluck, American poet, born 1943