Ballast Quotes
A hot air balloon requires a great deal of fuel to keep it aloft, so that you can't fly it even for one day. A gas balloon, which usually uses helium, has the problem that the helium cools at night when the sun is not on it, and you have to throw ballast overboard to keep it from going to the surface.
Steve Fossett
When, in the year 1913, in my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square on a white field. The critics and, along with them, the public sighed, 'Everything which we loved was lost. We are in a desert... Before us is nothing but a black square on a white background!
Kazimir Malevich
Especially in its opening scenes, Ballast is "slower" and "quieter" than we usually expect. You know what? So is life, most of the time. We don't wake up and immediately start engaging with plot points. But Ballast inexorably grows and deepens and gathers power and absorbs us. I always say I hardly ever cry at sad films, but I sometimes do, just a little, at films about good people.
Roger Ebert
All these poets are ascetics, monks and priests. They despise the flesh and all ballast. This world holds no enchantment for them... Poetry for them is the ultimate expression of the essence of things and thus is hymn and worship. Their poetry is one of divine names, of mysterious seals, and of spiritual extracts.
Hugo Ball
I'm being provided with some emotional ballast by giving me an intimate portrait of one character in particular in contrast to the collective. I'm fortunate that I had very sympathetic readers, but ordinarily - if a book makes you laugh too much, it shifts from "literature" to "entertainment."
Joshua Ferris
'Beauty Queen' is the weirdest, strangest, and most perfect play to do before 'Hedda Gabler', because there are so many similar issues for Maureen and Hedda. I had played leading ladies before but couldn't really hook into them. After 'An American Daughter' and 'Beauty Queen', I had all the ballast.
Kate Burton
Could the Church of Work-which today has Americans aspiring to sleep deprivation the way they once aspired to a personal knowledge of God-be, at base, an anti-democratic force? Well, yes. James Russell Lowell, that nineteenth-century workhorse, summed it all up quite neatly: "There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and saving it from all risk of crankiness, than business.”.
Mark Slouka
Having finished his argument Stephen walked on in silence. He felt Cranly's hostility and he accused himself of having cheapened the eternal images of beauty. For the first time, too, he felt slightly awkward in his friend's company and to restore a mood of flippant familiarity he glanced up at the clock of the Ballast Office and smiled:
- It has not epiphanised yet, he said.
James Joyce
This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. He told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office was capable of an epiphany. Cranly questioned the inscrutable dial of the Ballast Office with his no less inscrutable countenance:
-Yes, said Stephen. I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin's street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany.
James Joyce
