Molly Peacock · 416 pages
Rating: (865 votes)
“Is being burnt a requisite for the making of art? Personally, I don't think it is. But art is poultice for a burn. It is a privilege to have, somewhere within you, a capacity for making something speak from your own seared experience.”
― Molly Peacock, quote from The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life's Work at 72
“But if a role model in her seventies isn't layered with contradictions - as we all come to be - then what good is she? Why bother to cut the silhouette of another's existence and place it against our own if it isn't as incongruous, ambiguous, inconsistent, and paradoxical as our own lives are?”
― Molly Peacock, quote from The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life's Work at 72
“The secret of marriage is thinking that your partner is better than yourself.”
― Molly Peacock, quote from The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life's Work at 72
“Having a collection, taking it out, looking at it, reordering it, and putting it away is creative in itself. It doesn't yield a product, like the results of an art, but is stops time, as making art does.”
― Molly Peacock, quote from The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life's Work at 72
“Robert Phelps, a biographer of Colette, said about watching, 'Along with love and work, this is the third great salvation. For whenever someone is seriously watching, a form of lost innocence is restored. It will not last, but during those minutes his self-consciousness is relieved.' Noticing keeps you alive.”
― Molly Peacock, quote from The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life's Work at 72
Molly Peacock
Born place: in Buffalo, New York, The United States
Born date June 30, 2018
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“I know a man who drives 600 yards to work. I know a woman who gets in her car to go a quarter of a mile to a college gymnasium to walk on a treadmill, then complains passionately about the difficulty of finding a parking space. When I asked her once why she didn't walk to the gym and do five minutes less on the treadmill, she looked at me as if I were being willfully provocative. 'Because I have a program for the treadmill,' she explained. 'It records my distance and speed, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty.' It hadn't occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard.”
― Bill Bryson, quote from A Walk in the Woods
“I look'd to Heav'n, and try'd to pray; But or ever a prayer had gusht, A wicked whisper came and made My heart as dry as dust.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, quote from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
“He had the gaunt and haunted athletic look of those who stare daily down the bony gullet of the great god Aerobics.”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Bonfire of the Vanities
“People who sacrifice beauty for efficiency get what they deserve. (Bernard Mickey Wrangle, p 99)”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Still Life with Woodpecker
“Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.”
― Stephen King, quote from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
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