Bottom Quotes - page 39
It feels like a moment I've lived a thousand times before, as if everything is familiar, right up to the moment of my death, that it will happen again an infinite number of times, that we will meet, marry, have our children, succeed in the ways we have, fail in the ways we have, all exactly the same, always unable to change a thing. I am again at the bottom of an unstoppable wheel, and when I feel my eyes close for death, as they have and will a thousand times, I awake.
Jonathan Safran Foer
A fact is discovered, a theory is invented; is any theory ever deep enough for it to be truly called a creation? Most scientists would answer: no! Science, they would say, engages only part of the mind - the rational intellect - but creation must engage the whole mind. Science demands none of that ground swell of emotion, none of the rich bottom of personality, which fills out the work of art...
Creation consists in finding unity, finding likenesses, finding pattern...
Nature herself is chaos; she is full of infinite variety without order. But if you see her with inner vision, a creative mind (whether a poetic mind like Charles Baudelaire's or a scientific mind like Isaac Newton's), there comes a moment when many different aspects suddenly crystallize in a single unity. You have found a key; you have found a clue; you have found the path which organizes the material. You have found what Coleridge called "unity in variety."
Jacob Bronowski
Along with the steady diet sitar, sarod, and tabla, several new instruments and players came to my attention. The first of these was Ustad Bismillah Khan, master of the sonorous double-reed instrument known as shehnai. This beautiful wind instrument, with finger holes and a bell-shaped opening at the bottom, sounded to me like a hybrid of soprano saxophone and oboe, and Bismillah Khan's tone very much influenced what Coltrane and Terry Riley would do with the soprano sax. Primarily used at weddings, the shehnai had been rejected as a classical instrument until Bismillah Khan elevated it to a higher status among listeners. His unique fingertips and sublime breath control produced the necessary range of sounds for raga making shehnai one of the more popular instruments in North India.
Bismillah Khan
Where the shadow of the bridge fell I could see down for a long way, but not as far as the bottom. When you leave a leaf in water a long time after awhile the tissue will be gone and the delicate fibres waving slow as the motion of sleep. They don't touch one another, no matter how knotted up they once were, no matter how close they lay once to the bones.
William Faulkner
No matter how bad the wicked world has hurt you, in the long run, there is something gained, and it is all for the best ... The note of hope is the only note that can help us or save us from falling to the bottom of the heap of evolution, because, largely, about all a human being is, anyway, is just a hoping machine, a working machine.
Woody Guthrie
