Composition Quotes - Page 17

• You think OWS is radical? You think 350.org was radical for helping organize mass civil disobedience in D.C. in August against the Keystone Pipeline? We're not radical. Radicals work for oil companies. The CEO of Exxon gets up every morning and goes to work changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere. No one has ever done anything as radical as that, not in all of human history.

  Bill McKibben

  Change, Morning, Work

  "The Most Important News Story of the Day/Millennium" by Bill McKibben, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 5, 2011.

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• In every art beginners must start with models of those who have practiced the same art before them. And it is not only a matter of looking at the drawings, paintings, musical compositions, and poems that have been and are being created; it is a matter of being drawn into the individual work of art, of realizing that it has been made by a real human being, and trying to discover the secret of its creation.

  Ruth Whitman

  Art, Real, Drawing

  Ruth Whitman (1982). “Becoming a poet: source, process, practice”, Writer

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• I create my subjects somehow visualizing them in my style. I start as a poet, put the colors and composition down on canvas as a painter, but finish my work as a sculptor taking delight in caressing the forms.

  Fernando Botero

  Color, Style, Delight

  Fernando Botero (1972). “Fernando Botero”

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• In mauve sea-orchids as in her striking earlier book Guardians of the Secret, Lila Zemborain brings into relationship the viscera of the body and the spill of the universe in tense compositions that blur distinctions between lyric and prose poetry, between science and eros.

  Forrest Gander

  Book, Prose Poetry, Sea

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• I wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to use the same aesthetics as painting, which has always paid great attention to formal devices of structure, composition and framing.

  Peter Greenaway

  Ideas, Plot, Cinema

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• How the visual world appears is important to me. I'm always aware of the light. I'm always aware of what I would call the 'deep composition.' Photography in the field is a process of creation, of thought and technique. But ultimately, it's an act of imaginatively seeing from within yourself.

  Sam Abell

  Photography, Light, Important

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• When you know the lyrics to a tune, you have some kind of insight as to it's composition. If you don't understand what it's about, you're depriving yourself of being really able to communicate this poem.

  Dexter Gordon

  Being Real, Tunes, Able

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• A short story padded. A species of composition bearing the same relation to literature that the panorama bears to art. As it is too long to be read at a sitting the impressions made by its successive parts are successively effaced, as in the pa

  Ambrose Bierce

  Success, Art, Long

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• Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent. He has facts ready to his hand; so there is no exercise of invention. Imagination is not required in any degree; only about as much as is used in the lowest kinds of poetry. Some penetration, accuracy, and coloring, will fit a man for the task, if he can give the application which is necessary.

  Samuel Johnson

  Exercise, Men, Hands

  James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Edmond Malone (1824). “The life of Samuel Johnson, LL. D., comprehending an account of his studies, and numerous works, in chronological order: a series of his epistolary correspondence and conversations with many eminent persons; and various original pieces of his composition, never before published; the whole exhibiting a view of literature and literary men in Great Britain, for near half a century during which he flourished”, p.373

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• It is my PRIDE, my damned, native, unconquerable Pride, that plunges me into Distraction. You must know that 19 - 20th of my Composition is Pride. I must either live a Slave, a Servant; to have no Will of my own, no Sentiments of my own which I may freely declare as such; --or DIE --perplexing alternative!

  Thomas Chatterton

  Pride, Alternatives, Unconquerable Will

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• ...it is seldom indeed that a composition which was poor when the picture was taken can be improved by reshaping it in the dark room.

  Henri Cartier-Bresson

  Photography, Taken, Dark

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• Attempts have been made from a study of the changes produced by mutation to obtain the relative order of the bases within various triplets, but my own view is that these are premature until there is more extensive and more reliable data on the composition of the triplets.

  Francis Crick

  Views, Order, Data

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• See what's inside a drop of water. The whole seed of the universe. Come, come. See what's inside a drop of blood. The composition of life. It's all there. Hate as well. We approach the mystery of life, but it's impossible to understand the mystery of hate. The kind of hate that causes people not only to kill, but to want to erase you from the census of births. I have to concentrate on that mystery. Read everything there is. It has to be in a drop of blood. It has to have its chemistry.

  Manuel Rivas

  Hate, Blood, People

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• Visually Agincourt is a pre-Raphaelite, perhaps better a Medici Gallery print battle - a composition of strong verticals and horizontals and a conflict of rich dark reds and Lincoln greens against fishscale greys and arctic blues.

  John Keegan

  Strong, Dark, Battle

  John Keegan (1983). “The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme”, p.59, Penguin

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• I still feel the impulse to give young writers a hearing, and I believe I have played more unpublished compositions than any other band leader in the country.

  John Philip Sousa

  Country, Believe, Giving

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• Satire is a composition of salt and mercury; and it depends upon the different mixture and preparation of those ingredients, that it comes out a noble medicine, or a rank poison.

  Francis Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey

  Science, Differences, Medicine

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• It (Strayhorn's Compositions) made us all think a little differently about what we were doing

  Benny Carter

  Thinking, Littles, Made

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• There was a lot that was tricky about playing with [Thelonious Monk]. It's a musical language where there's really no lyrics. It's something you feel and you're hearing. It's like an ongoing conversation. You really had to listen to this guy. Cause he could play the strangest tempos, and they could be very in-between tempos on some of those compositions. You really had to listen to his arrangements and the way he would play them. On his solos, you'd really have to listen good in there. You'd have to concentrate on what you were doing as well.

  Roy Haynes

  Music, Play, Guy

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• You have to know composition to be a good improviser.

  Roscoe Mitchell

  Music, Jazz, Knows

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• Thelonious Sphere Monk: there's not a more perfect name to fit his compositions than that name.

  Matthew Shipp

  Music, Names, Perfect

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• You should neither play bad compositions, nor, unless compelled, listen to them.

  Robert Schumann

  Play, Should, Compelled

  Robert Schumann (1860). “Advice to Young Musicians”, p.14

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• To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression. And this organization, this precision, will always escape you, if you do not appreciate what a picture is, if you do not understand that the composition, the logic, the equilibrium of the surfaces and values are the only ways of giving meaning to all that is continuously appearing and vanishing before our very eyes.

  Henri Cartier-Bresson

  Photography, Eye, Expression

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• As sounds in a musical composition can be used not to express physical objects but ideas, emotions, harmonies, rhythmic orders and most any expression of the human mind and spirit, so light can be used visually to express the mind and spirit.

  Wynn Bullock

  Photography, Art, Creativity

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• I allow my creativity to push me in directions that are simply interesting to me and I don’t worry about the likeness of the result to some notion - some paradigm - of what music composition is supposed to be.

  Mark Applebaum

  Creativity, Interesting, Worry

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• A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious retreat of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.

  Cyril Connolly

  Travel, Past, Years

  Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.114, University of Chicago Press

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