Enchantment Quotes - Page 4

• The work of art still has something in common with enchantment: it posits its own, self-enclosed area, which is withdrawn from the context of profane existence, and in which special laws apply.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Self, Law

  Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer (1997). “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, p.19, Verso

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• In music everything is prolonged, everything is edified, and when the enchantment has ceased, we are still bathed in its clarity; solitude is accompanied by a new hope between pity for ourselves - which makes us more indulgent and more understanding - and the certitude of finding something again, that which lives for ever in music.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Music, Solitude, Understanding

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• As a writing man, or secretary, I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly and unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost.

  E. B. White

  Writing, Men, Might

  E. B. White (2011). “In the Words of E.B. White: Quotations from America's Most Companionable of Writers”, p.23, Cornell University Press

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• Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.

  Anais Nin

  Suffering, Stories, Saved

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• I am in the middle of it: chaos and poetry; poetry and love and again, complete chaos. Pain, disorder, occasional clarity; and at the bottom of it all: only love; poetry. Sheer enchantment, fear, humiliation. It all comes with love

  Anna Akhmatova

  Pain, And Love, Chaos

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• One of the things I've discovered at my age is I must have enchantment. And that was not clear to me in my earlier years. When I look at my favorite films, the Frank Capra - even Scorsese, even 'Goodfellas,' what makes that movie so remarkable is there's enchantment in their world.

  David O. Russell

  Years, Age, Looks

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• Sex is all the enchantment required. Do men find women so enchanting once the sex is taken out? Does anyone find anyone that enchanting unless they have sexual business with them? Who else are you enchanted by? Nobody.

  Philip Roth

  Sex, Taken, Men

  Philip Roth (2001). “The Dying Animal”, p.28, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The store of fairy tales, that blue chamber where stories lie waiting to be rediscovered, holds out the promise of just those creative enchantments, not only for its own characters caught in its own plotlines; it offers magical metamorphoses to the one who opens the door, who passes on what was found there, and to those who hear what the storyteller brings. The faculty of wonder, like curiosity can make things happen; it is time for wishful thinking to have its due.

  Marina Warner

  Lying, Character, Thinking

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• Maybe all wondrous books appear in our lives the way Milo’s tollbooth appears, an inexplicable gift, cast up by some curious chance that comes to feel, after we have finished and fallen in love with the book, like the workings of a secret purpose. Of all the enchantments of beloved books the most mysterious-the most phantasmal-is the way they always seem to come our way precisely when we need them.

  Michael Chabon

  Book, Secret, Needs

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• Defy the crowd. The crowd isn’t always wise. It can also lead you down a path of silliness, sub-optimal choices, and downright destruction. Enchantment is as necessary for people to diverge from a crowd as it is to get people to join one.

  Guy Kawasaki

  Wise, People, Choices

  FaceBook post by Guy Kawasaki from Feb 07, 2013

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• When the object is perceived as particular and unique and not merely the member of a family, when it appears independent of any general notion and detached from the sanity of a cause, isolated and inexplicable in the light of ignorance, then and only then may it be a source of enchantment.

  Samuel Beckett

  Art, Ignorance, Independent

  Samuel Beckett (1970). “The collected works of Samuel Beckett”

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• Rosanne Daryl Thomas's tale of her enchantment by bees is a delight to read. It also contains close observations of the natural world, tales of failure and triumph with the hives, and a stellar cast of characters that includes her daughter, their cats, the hapless Farmer Tom, Pete the crossing guard, and, most important, the Bee Master. Every word tastes sweet as honey.

  Janet Lembke

  Daughter, Sweet, Character

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• What verse is for the poet, dialectical thinking is for the philosopher. He grasps for it in order to get hold of his own enchantment, in order to perpetuate it.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Philosophical, Thoughtful, Thinking

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (2012). “Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks”, p.44, Regnery Publishing

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• I suppose there's something to be said for the sheer reinforcement of our beliefs, but really I think poetry is more useful as disenchantment than enchantment.

  Robert Hass

  Thinking, Reinforcement, Belief

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

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• I was always fascinated by fairy stories, fantasy, you know, demons, necromancers, gods and goddesses, everything that is out of our kin and out of our everyday world. I was always interested in enchantment and magicians and still am.

  Christopher Lee

  Fairy Stories, Everyday, Gods And Goddesses

  Source: www.npr.org

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• Witchery is merely a word for what we are all capable of - heightened nightsight, an empathy shared with the beasts, a utilization of the more obscure abilities of our minds. Nothing that science can't explain away. Wizardry is spells and enchantments. Fairy tales.

  Charles de Lint

  Empathy, Mind, Wizardry

  "Into the Green". Book by Charles de Lint, 1993.

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• In alarming proportions the following words have disappeared from architectural publications: beauty, inspiration, magic, sorcery, enchantment, and also serenity, mystery, silence, privacy, astonishment. All of these have found a loving home in my soul.

  Luis Barragan

  Inspiration, Home, Silence

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• Pop music is not just a clumsy mass fanaticism, connected to a deceitful enchantment totally lacking in moral rigour.

  Paul Morley

  Moral, Deceitful, Mass

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• We are prisoners of the world's demented sink.
  The soft enchantments of our years of innocence
  Are harvested by accredited experience
  Our fondest memories soon turn to poison
  And only oblivion remains in season.

  John Ashbery

  Life, Memories, Years

  John Ashbery (1986). “Selected Poems”

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• When the boys come into my yard for leave to gather horse-chestnuts, I own I enter into nature's game, and affect to grant the permission reluctantly, fearing that any moment they will find out the imposture of that showy chaff. But this tenderness is quite unnecessary; the enchantments are laid on very thick. Their young life is thatched with them. Bare and grim to tears is the lot of the children in the hovel I saw yesterday; yet not the less they hang it round with frippery romance, like the children of the happiest fortune.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Horse, Children, Boys

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.2389, Delphi Classics

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• All industries are brought under the control of such people [film producers] by Capitalism. If the capitalists let themselves be seduced from their pursuit of profits to the enchantments of art, they would be bankrupt before they knew where they were. You cannot combine the pursuit of money with the pursuit of art.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Movie, Art, People

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• It would be a miracle of God if it happened. I know it... If God wills it, the summer rains will fill the wadis... and the salmon will run the river. And then my countrymen... all classes and manner of men-will stand side by side and fish for the salmon. And their natures, too, will be changed. They will feel the enchantment of this silver fish... and then when talk turns to what this tribe said or that tribe did... then someone will say, Let us arise, and go fishing.

  Paul Torday

  Summer, Running, Rain

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• Again men have been kept back as by a kind of enchantment from progress in science by reverence for antiquity, by the authority of men counted great in philosophy, and then by general consent.

  Francis Bacon

  Philosophy, Men, Progress

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• This is a city of absolute enchantment in the literal sense of the word. It loosens all the bonds binding the traveller to his own age and sets him free to live in a past that is vital and crude but never ugly. Herat is as old as history and as moving as a great epic poem - if Afghanistan had nothing else it would have been worth coming to experience this.

  Dervla Murphy

  Moving, Epic, Past

  Dervla Murphy (1987). “Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle”, p.39, The Overlook Press

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• I want to try to apply my abilities sometimes to make families happy, so I have to make movies at a venue that are not gratuitously violent, that are not using bullets and bloodshed, but are using things like magic and fantasy and enchantment and the imagination. To me that's just all positive stuff. But I am eclectic and I still like to make movies for the midnight audience as well.

  Nicolas Cage

  Imagination, Magic, Trying

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