Leading Quotes - page 20
'There you are', said Efros [Granovsky, director of the State Jewish Chamber Theater, in 1920], leading me into a dark room, 'These walls are all yours, you can do what you like with them'. It was a completely demolished apartment that had been abandoned by bourgeois refugees. 'You see', he continued, 'the benches for the audience will be here; the stage there'. To tell the truth, all I could see there was the remains of a kitchen.. .And I flung myself at the walls. The canvases were stretched out on the floor. Workmen, actors walked over them. The rooms and corridors were in the process of being repaired; piles of shavings lay among my tubes of paint, my sketches. At every step one dislodged cigarette-ends, crusts of bread.
Marc Chagall
Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world's leading space-faring nation.
John F. Kennedy
"Fool. There is no why. The very word is a semantic fallacy. Ask me how and I can lay out for you cause and effect, one thing leading to another, the alcohol acting on a grieving man's mind, the door inadequately guarded, the people within isolated from the common lot of humanity by the dreadful secret of their ancestry.”
He rattled his glass.
Nathan refilled it.
Faust drank. "But to ask why,” he continued, "implies that things happen for a purpose, and they do not. There is no purpose, no direction, no guidance to events. Nothing means anything. The world is a howling desert of meaningless, and reason is useless before it. There is only blind event.”
He stared off into the bleak landscapes of the future while Nathan refilled his glass and refilled his glass and refilled his glass.
He saw so clearly now, without delusion or hope. It was a crystal night of the soul.
Michael Swanwick