Flatness Quotes

• On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.

  Karl Marx

  Simple, Intelligent, Levels

  Das Kapital vol. 1, ch. 16 (1867) (translation by Ben Fowkes)

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• I call to mind flatness and dampness; and then all is madness - the madness of a memory which busies itself among forbidden things.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Memories, Mind, Madness

  Edgar Allan Poe (1927). “Tales by Edgar Allan Poe”, p.383, Dimitrios Spyridon Chytiris

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• He who is able to accept everything gladly from the Lord - including darkness, dryness, flatness - and completely disregard self is he who lives for Him.

  Watchman Nee

  Self, Darkness, Able

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• To me it is no mystery that we can only photograph effectively what we are truly interested in or-maybe more importantly-are grappling with. Often unconsciously. Otherwise the photographs are merely about an idea or a concept-that stuff eventually falls flat for me-there must be something more, some emotional hook for it to really work for me.

  Todd Hido

  Photography, Fall, Emotional

  "A conversation with Todd Hido". Interview with Joerg Colberg, jmcolberg.com. June 18, 2007.

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• If flatness were funny, a dinner plate would be hilarious.

  Walter Moers

  Would Be, Dinner Plates, Ifs

  Walter Moers (2007). “Rumo: And His Miraculous Adventures”, p.165, The Overlook Press

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• To the dear eye and eloquent tongue, to the soul made of fire, and the character that bends but does not break... I am ever tender and true.

  Charlotte Bronte

  Character, Eye, Fire

  Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Anne Bronte (2009). “The Bronte Sisters: Three Novels: Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights; and Agnes Grey (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.213, Penguin

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• To women who please me only by their faces, I am the very devil when I find out they have neither souls nor hearts — when they open to me a perspective of flatness, triviality, and perhaps imbecility, coarseness, and ill-temper: but to the clear eye and eloquent tongue, to the soul made of fire, and the character that bends but does not break — at once supple and stable, tractable and consistent — I am ever tender and true. (Mr Rochester to Jane)

  Charlotte Bronte

  Eye, Heart, Character

  Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Anne Bronte (2009). “The Bronte Sisters: Three Novels: Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights; and Agnes Grey (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.213, Penguin

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• ...being written by someone who might not quite understand the subconscious nuance of the character leaves us in varying degrees of flatness.

  Jasper Fforde

  Character, Might, Nuance

  Jasper Fforde (2011). “One of our Thursdays is Missing: Thursday Next”, p.222, Hachette UK

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• If you look at the image [ Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self ], it treads on a kind of popular stereotypical image of the black figure, in both its flatness and slightly comic edge. To take that image as a starting point and to render it in a proto-classical medium, like egg tempera, and then use a repertoire of classical compositional devices to make the picture was a way of setting up an engagement with art history.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Art, Self, Eggs

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• When I was a kid in London there was just something about the light and there's something about the way London went onto film in those days, whether it was Technicolor or Technicolor plus the flatness of the light, or whatever.

  William Monahan

  Kids, Light, London

  Source: collider.com

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• I wanted to avoid what some modern tellers have done, quite legitimately, to make fairy tales more like novels and short stories, to characterize the heroes and the heroines much more than they are characterized in Grimm. I like the psychological flatness of them, the fact that they're more like masks than individuals.

  Philip Pullman

  Hero, Stories, Done

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• All that stuff about flatness - it's this idea that painting is a specialized discipline and that modernist painting increasingly refers to painting and is refining the laws of painting. But who cares about painting? What we care about is that the planet is heating up, species are disappearing, there's war, and there are beautiful girls here in Brooklyn on the avenue and there's food and flowers.

  Chris Martin

  Beautiful, Girl, War

  Interview with Ross Simonini, www.believermag.com. November 2013.

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• There is something intrinsically wrong about letters. For one thing they are not instantaneous. ... Nor is this the only trouble about letters. They do not arrive often enough. A letter which has been passionately awaited should be immediately supplemented by another one, to counteract the feeling of flatness that comes upon us when the agonizing delights of anticipation have been replaced by the colder flood of fulfilment.

  Vita Sackville-West

  Feelings, Delight, Agonizing

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• When you're on a highway, viewing the western U.S. with the mountains and the flatness and the desert and all that, it's very much like my paintings.

  Edward Ruscha

  Mountain, Desert, Painting

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• Anaximenes and Anaxagoras and Democritus say that its [the earth's] flatness is responsible for it staying still: for it does not cut the air beneath but covers it like a lid, which flat bodies evidently do: for they are hard to move even for the winds, on account of their resistance.

  Aristotle

  Moving, Cutting, Science

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• The sins of the Midwest: flatness, emptiness, a necessary acceptance of the familiar. Where is the romance in being buried alive? In growing old?

  Stewart O'Nan

  Acceptance, Romance, Midwest

  Stewart O'Nan (2008). “Songs for the Missing: A Novel”, p.12, Penguin

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• I can often tell when drawings are done from photographs, because you can tell what they miss out, what the camera misses out: usually weight and volume - there's a flatness to them.

  David Hockney

  Drawing, Missing, Cameras

  "Sunlight, beaches and boys" by Edmund White, www.theguardian.com. September 8, 2006.

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