Fantastic Quotes - Page 30

• I have a great need to learn what the norm is by dealing with what is not the norm... with the grotesque and the fantastic.

  Alfred Brendel

  Desire, Needs, Grotesque

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• Of course all children's literature is not fantastic, so all fantastic books need not be children's books. It is still possible, even in an age so ferociously anti-romantic as our own, to write fantastic stories for adults: though you will usually need to have made a name in some more fashionable kind of literature before anyone will publish them.

  C. S. Lewis

  Children, Book, Writing

  C. S. Lewis (2002). “On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature”, p.58, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• No matter through what realms of the fantastic you may travel, you arrive inevitably at the commonplace.

  William John Locke

  May, Matter, Realms

  William John Locke (1906). “The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne: A Novel”

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• All serious art, music, literature is a critical act. It is so, firstly, in the sense of Matthew Arnold's phrase: "a criticism of life." Be it realistic, fantastic, Utopian or satiric, the construct of the artist is a counter-statement to the world.

  George Steiner

  Art, Criticism, Phrases

  George Steiner (2010). “Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?”, p.11, Faber & Faber

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• Lazy Line Painter Jane - it was an insane way to make a record! It was just in a church hall, no separate rooms for instruments, and a crappy digital desk, and I think it's fantastic. I think it's one of the best records we ever made. But if you actually said that to a professional recording engineer or producer they'd laugh at you.

  Stevie Jackson

  Thinking, Laughing, Lazy

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• I really feel the need to create an alternate world, a vision of what might be magical and beautiful and fantastic about being human.

  Shary Boyle

  Beautiful, Vision, Needs

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• Music has been a fantastic guidance for me. I'll be eternally thankful for this guidance.

  Pinchas Zukerman

  Guidance, Has Beens

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• He’s a fantastic talent and the complete footballer, probably the most coveted in the Premiership. It’s a privilege for the rest of us to be on the same field. If i could have anything i wanted for Christmas, i’d take Thierry Henry

  Steve Bruce

  Fields, Privilege, Talent

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• The world is still a fantastic and wondrous place to live.

  Seal

  World, Places To Live, Stills

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• What shall I compare it to, this fantastic thing I call my Mind? To a waste-paper basket, to a sieve choked with sediment, or to a barrel full of floating froth and refuse? No, what it is really most like is a spider's web, insecurely hung on leaves and twigs, quivering in every wind, and sprinkled with dewdrops and dead flies. And at its centre, pondering forever the Problem of Existence, sits motionless the spider-like and uncanny Soul.

  Logan Pearsall Smith

  Wind, Forever, Soul

  Logan Pearsall Smith (1989). “An anthology”

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• There are some good things and some fantastic ones in Auden's early attitude; if the reader calls it a muddle I shall acquiesce, with the remark that the later position might be considered a more rarefied muddle. But poets rather specialize in muddles and I have no doubt which of the muddles was better for Auden's poetry: one was fertile and usable, the other decidedly is not. Auden sometimes seems to be saying with Henry Clay, "I had rather be right than poetry"; but I am not sure, then, that he is either.

  Randall Jarrell

  Attitude, Doubt, Might

  "The Third Book of Criticism". Book by Randall Jarrell, "Changes of Attitude and Rhetoric in Auden's Poetry" (p. 131), 1969.

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• Whoever the kid had been, whoever had the grand attitude, has finally heeded the admonishment of parents, teachers, governments, religions, and the law: "You just change your attitude now please, young man." This transformation in kids - from flashing dragonflies, so to say, to sticky water-surface worms slowly slipping downstream - is noticed with pride by society and with mortification by God, which is a fantastic way of saying I don't like to see kids throw away their truth just because it isn't worth a dime in the open market.

  William Saroyan

  Teacher, Attitude, Kids

  William Saroyan (1968). “I used to believe I had forever, now I'm not so sure”

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• Some celebrities, it's interesting, because they're fantastic playing a character when somebody is writing the lines for them, and they're amazing actors, but they're not as comfortable on television in front of a live audience and just having a conversation and being themselves.

  Ellen DeGeneres

  Character, Writing, Interesting

  "Ellen Degeneres to freshen her talk show". The Associated Press Interview, www.today.com. September 2, 2006.

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• If you take a look at the most fantastic schemes that are considered impossible: teleportation, warp drive, parallel universes, other dimensions, artificial intelligence, ray guns, you realize that they can be possible if we advance technology a little bit.

  Michio Kaku

  Gun, Technology, Rays

  Interview with Deepak Chopra, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 16, 2010.

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• Photography's central role is to be the absolute medium of the day. It is fantastic that there is no longer any technical intimidation.

  Martin Parr

  Photography, Roles, Intimidation

  "An Interview with Martin Parr – “Boundaries Merely Exist in People's Minds” (2007)". Interview with Maarten Dings and Joachim Naudts, www.americansuburbx.com. May 17, 2010.

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• The tighter a deadline is, the more I'm inclined to be perverse and rebellious - I'll start thinking about another, different project, until it becomes the most fantastic thing which I must start immediately.

  Errollyn Wallen

  Thinking, Priorities, Different

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• And there is something great about knowing that my only job is to be as happy as I can be about my life, and feel as good as I can about myself, and to lead as full and eventful a life as I can, so that it doesn’t ever feel like I’m just waiting around for some guy to ask me out. And most importantly, it’s good for us all to remember that we don’t need to scheme and plot and beg to get someone to ask us out. We’re fantastic.

  Liz Tuccillo

  Jobs, Waiting Around, Knowing

  Greg Behrendt, Liz Tuccillo (2009). “He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys”, p.19, Simon and Schuster

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• A data scientist is that unique blend of skills that can both unlock the insights of data and tell a fantastic story via the data.

  DJ Patil

  Unique, Data, Skills

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• Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. It speaks of what seems fantastic and unreal to those who have lost the simple intuitions which are the test of reality; and, as it is often found at war with its age, so it makes no account of history, which is fabled by the daughters of memory.

  James Joyce

  Daughter, Memories, War

  James Joyce (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of James Joyce (Illustrated)”, p.2218, Delphi Classics

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• I try to get a feeling of what's going on in the story before I put it down on paper, but actually most of this breaking-in period is one long, fantastic daydream, in which I think about anything but the work at hand. I can't turn out slews of stuff each day. I wish I could. I seem to have some neurotic need to perfect each paragraph—each sentence, even—as I go along.

  William Styron

  Writing, Thinking, Hands

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• We live on two levels ... the realistic level and the fantastic level, and which is the real one, really?

  Tennessee Williams

  Real, Two, Levels

  Tennessee Williams (1993). “The Theatre of Tennessee Williams”, p.317, New Directions Publishing

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• I should describe mine own nature as tripartite, my interests consisting of three parallel and dissociated groups - (a) Love of the strange and fantastic. (b) Love of the abstract truth and of scientific logick. (c) Love of the ancient and the permanent. Sundry combinations of these three strains will probably account for all my odd tastes and eccentricities.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Groups, Three, Taste

  Letter to Reinhardt Kleiner (7 March 1920), in "Selected Letters I, 1911-1924" edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, (p. 110), 1964.

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• I define Inner Space as an imaginary realm in which on the one hand the outer world of reality, and on the other the inner world of the mind meet and merge. Now, in the landscapes of the surrealist painters, for example, one sees the regions of Inner Space; and increasingly I believe that we will encounter in film and literature scenes which are neither solely realistic nor fantastic. In a sense, it will be a movement in the interzone between both spheres.

  J. G. Ballard

  Believe, Reality, Hands

  Munich Round Up Interview, 1968.

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• Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities his preeminence over them simply and solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of his wants, physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual. Had his whole life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary.

  William James

  Lying, Character, Men

  William James (2015). “Essays in Popular Philosophy: Top Essays”, p.83, 谷月社

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• The Hindu religion appears ... as a cathedral temple, half in ruins, noble in the mass, often fantastic in detail but always fantastic with a significance crumbling or badly outworn in places, but a cathedral temple in which service is still done to the Unseen and its real presence can be felt by those who enter with the right spirit.

  Sri Aurobindo

  Real, Unseen, Details

  Sri Aurobindo (1970). “Letters on Yoga”, Lotus Press (WI)

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