Contemporary Quotes - Page 22

• The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Ideas, Analysis

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• Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.

  Mary McCarthy

  Sex, Character, Space

  Mary McCarthy (1964). “The humanist in the bathtub”

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• The only difference between the narrator of contemporary affairs and the ordinary historian is that moral judgments about the present provoke fiercer reactions and have more immediately practical implications than moral judgments about the past.

  Geoffrey Barraclough

  Past, Differences, Narrators

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• Chicago's downtown seems to me to constitute, all in all, the best-looking twentieth-century city, the city where contemporary technique has best been matched by artistry, intelligence, and comparatively moderated greed. No doubt about it, if style were the one gauge, Chicago would be among the greatest of all the cities of the world.

  Jan Morris

  Cities, Greed, Doubt

  Jan Morris (1993). “Locations”, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Contemporary Christianity, diverse and complex as we find it, actually may show more unanimity than the Christian churches of the first and second centuries. For nearly all Christians since that time, Catholics, Protestants, or Orthodox, have shared three basic premises. First, they accept the canon of the New Testament; second, they confess the apostolic creed; and third, they affirm specific forms of church institution. But every one of these - the canon of Scripture, the creed, and the institutional structure - emerged in its present form only toward the end of the second century.

  Elaine Pagels

  Christian, Catholic, Religion

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• Contemporary societies have lost the sense of the feast but have kept the obscure drive for it.

  Umberto Eco

  Food, Cooking, Obscure

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• Contemporary feminism cut itself off from history and bankrupted itself when it spun its puerile, paranoid fantasy of male oppressors and female sex-object victims. Woman is the dominant sex.

  Camille Paglia

  Sex, Cutting, Feminism

  "Sex, Art and American Culture: Essays". Book by Camille Paglia, p. 10, 1992.

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• the backlash convinced the public that women's 'liberation' was the true contemporary American scourge - the source of an endless laundry list of personal, social, and economic problems.

  Susan Faludi

  Feminism, Lists, Problem

  Susan Faludi (1991). “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women”

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• Contemporary poets are skeptical and suspicious even, or perhaps especially, about themselves. They publicly confess to being poets only reluctantly, as if they were a little ashamed of it. But in our clamorous times it's much easier to acknowledge your faults, at least if they're attractively packaged, than to recognize your own merits, since these are hidden deeper and you never quite believe in them yourself.

  Wislawa Szymborska

  Believe, Never Quit, Faults

  Wislawa Szymborska, Stanisław Barańczak, Clare Cavanagh (2000). “Poems, New and Collected, 1957-1997”, p.13, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I am aware of myself as a four-hundred-year-old woman, born in the captivity of a colonial, pre-industrial oral culture and living now as a contemporary New Yorker.

  Bharati Mukherjee

  Years, Four, Captivity

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• Euclid manages to obtain a rigorous proof without ever dealing with infinity, by reducing the problem [of the infinitude of primes] to the study of finite numbers. This is exactly what contemporary mathematical analysis does.

  Lucio Russo

  Finite Number, Numbers, Doe

  "The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn". Book by Lucio Russo, 2004.

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• For to be contemporary is not necessarily to be part of any movement, to be included in the official representations of national and international art. History shows that it may well be the opposite. It may be that it is the odd, the personal, the curious, the simply honest, that at this moment, when everyone looks to the extreme and flamboyant, constitutes the most interesting manifestation of the spirit of art.

  Patrick Swift

  Art, Opposites, Interesting

  "Official Art and the Modern Painter". "X, A Quarterly Review" Magazine, Vol. I, No. 1, November 1959.

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• By the age of nine I had a thorough knowledge of contemporary Polish literature as well as of foreign literature in Polish translation, and I began to write poems in honour of a lady of thirty years. Naturally, she knew nothing about them.

  Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont

  Writing, Thorough Knowledge, Years

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• Nursing may be the oldest art, but in the contemporary world, it is also one of the most invisible. One of the most invisible arts, sciences, and certainly one of the most invisible parts of our health care system.

  Suzanne Gordon

  Art, Nursing, Nurse

  Suzanne Gordon (2012). “Life Support: Three Nurses on the Front Lines”, p.19, Cornell University Press

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• To do science today is to experience a dimension unique in contemporary working lives; the work promises something incomparable: the sense of living both personally and historically. That is why science now draws to itself all kinds of people - charlatans, mediocrities, geniuses - everyone who wants to touch the flame, feel alive to the time.

  Vivian Gornick

  Science, Unique, Flames

  Vivian Gornick (2013). “Women in Science: Then and Now”, p.16, The Feminist Press at CUNY

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• The culture and educational system of the contemporary West are based almost exclusively upon the training of the reasoning brain and, to a lesser degree, of the aesthetic emotions. Most of us have forgotten that we are not only brain and will, senses and feelings; we are also spirit. Modern man has for the most part lost touch with the truest and highest aspect of himself; and the result of this inward alienation can be seen all too plainly in his restlessness, his lack of identity and his loss of hope.

  Kallistos Ware

  Educational, Loss, Men

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• Yet the most pervasive error one encounters in contemporary arguments about belief in God-especially, but not exclusively, on the atheist side-is the habit of conceiving of God simply as some very large object or agency within the universe, or perhaps alongside the universe, a being among other beings, who differs from all other beings in magnitude, power, and duration, but not ontologically, and who is related to the world more or less as a craftsman is related to an artifact.

  David Bentley Hart

  Atheist, Errors, Agency

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• Rebecca Goldstein is a rare find among contemporary novelists: she has intellectual muscle as well as a tender emotional reach.

  Ian Mcewan

  Emotional, Intellectual, Novelists

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• I think a lot of artists no longer want to participate in or be associated with narrative because of its corruptedness in contemporary culture.

  Rachel Cusk

  Artist, Thinking, Culture

  "Go Forth (Vol. 34)". The Believer Interview, logger.believermag.com. June 17, 2015.

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• The writing you allude to is a form of dissent, but it's also expressive of the need to evolve beyond what is turgid and stale in contemporary fiction.

  Rachel Cusk

  Writing, Contemporary Fiction, Needs

  "Go Forth (Vol. 34)". Interview with Alice Whitwham, logger.believermag.com. June 17, 2015.

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• We live in a trans period. Contemporary issues of sexuality, for example - the exciting aspects of them - have to do with transgenderedness. And there's trans-nationality. There are people like me, for example. I mean, what am I? Am I Indian? Am I American? And I'm not alone in being between things.

  Vijay Seshadri

  Mean, Issues, People

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• All ideas about identity, of course, fit perfectly into the social media wonderland we live in. They seem to really connect. There's a science-fiction aspect to our contemporary life. What's virtual, what's real.

  Vijay Seshadri

  Real, Media, Ideas

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• Alan [Lomax] and his father started off changing the definition of folk music from something ancient and anonymous to something very contemporary.

  Pete Seeger

  Father, Definitions, Ancient

  Source: www.wholeearth.com

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• A contemporary or near-future book is much harder because you can't fake the facts. There are people alive who know much more than you do about the subject. You have to really have your research together - and of course no one can know everything about a topic.

  Steven Pressfield

  Book, People, Fake

  Source: www.patheos.com

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• There are some short essays that are very grave, and most contemporary novels are lighter than air.

  Fran Lebowitz

  Air, Graves, Novel

  Source: mrbellersneighborhood.com

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