Reader Quotes - page 29
GRONINGEN, BERLIN, MOSCOW, PARIS 1923
Start of the violet season
Reader
As we are convinced that it is not too LATE, we will speak.
Time is running, honestly.... it has become necessary now to do something, before it is too late
There must be witnessing and speaking..
.. Art is everywhere. She is thrown us people on our jackets by the birds. In every infant with weak intestines, the latent seed is laid for an artist..
Our first publication will soon be published. We urgently invite you to become a fellow reader [of the upcoming art-magazine 'The Next Call'].... We count on your DEEDS in the white season with the black shadows..
Hendrik Werkman
This exchange – mainly in the form of letters [between the brothers van Gogh] – was not only about painting and art, but covered everything to do with one's existence and the philosophical or religious colouring, in a word: for the reader of the letters written by Vincent to his brother a total of human behaviour is revealed that of the dual being of van Gogh. This is how my first wish and then obsession was started, to build a monument for the two van Gogh brothers.
Ossip Zadkine
Physics by its very nature requires extreme specialization on the part of its students. Its conclusions, which must eventually predict numbers for the results of actual measurements, are best expressed in mathematical formulae. This has the disadvantage of making the subject well-nigh unintelligible to the layman. There are unfortunately few teachers who are able to surmount this handicap. Professor Raman has written a book which avoids this pitfall and thus should give the lay reader an opportunity of penetrating at least part of the way into the mysteries of this interesting and important science.
C. V. Raman
The first class contains four, which, we are informed, may be properly called beasts for hunting; namely, the hare, the hart, the wolf, and the wild boar. The second class contains the names of the beasts of the chase, and they are five; that is to say, the buck, the doe, the fox, the martin, and the roe. In the third class we find three, that are said to afford "greate dysporte" in the pursuit, and they are denominated, the grey or badger, the wild-cat and the otter...The reader may possibly be surprised, when he casts his eye over the foregoing list of animals for hunting, at seeing the names of several that do not exist at this time in England, and especially of the wolf, because he will readily recollect the story so commonly told of their destruction during the reign of Edgar.
Joseph Strutt
Dear reader dearest inscrutable listener inscrutably harking or regrettably more likely not harking except in that chamber in me that posits you with me every moment I'm speaking or trying to speak
Dear reader who may or may not be with me I still remember how once you weren't here at all so I'd make up a mythical listener and there were good sides to that because I myself could choose
the degree of your presence the level of your attention from zero to fifty but then before I knew it you were somehow actually with me though it's still a mystery as to why you decided to join me.
C.K. Williams
There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however nave that may have been, it was a good deal less nave than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end.
Flannery O’Connor
Good Reader, I suspect I may have written some Things twice; if not the same in Words, yet in Sense, which I desire you to pass by favourably; forasmuch as you may well think, it was as difficult and dull a Thing for me, in so great a Number of independent Sentences, to find out the Repetitions, as it would be in a vast Heap of different Coins and Medals, confusedly thrown together, to pick out here and there one that bore the same and like Inscription, with some other among them. Besides the Pains, such a Search would cost me more Time, than I can afford it; for my Glass of Life running now low, I must not suffer one Sand to fall in waste, nor spend one Minute in picking of Straws. And moreover, my aged Eyes being grown weak and dim, I fear they will become quite dark, by much perusing and poring; or at least so far, so as to render me unable to perfect several Papers now lying by me, which I would willingly make a Present of to you.
Thomas Fuller (writer)
When I was a kid, back in the '40s, I was a voracious comic book reader. And at that time, there was a lot of patriotism in the comics. They were called things like 'All-American Comics' or 'Star-Spangled Comics' or things like that. I decided to do a logo that was a parody of those comics, with 'American' as the first word.
Harvey Pekar
I shall present as certain only those data corroborated by exhaustive research, or by my own personal investigations, as I am not untraveled for a bookish man. Wherever doubt exists, I shall unambiguously state its degree and nature, along with whatever grounds I may have for preferring one hypothesis over another. If, despite all I have said, the reader disdains such honest ambiguity, and stubbornly prefers the unequivocal assertiveness to be found in factitious travelogues penned by raffish "explorers,” or in the specious "natural histories” compiled by crapulous and unprincipled hacks who have never left their squalid lofts in Scrivener's Row, then there is nothing further I can do, and I leave him, with apologies, to his deception.
Michael Shea
