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1 " She hardly ever thought of him. He had worn a place for himself in some corner of her heart, as a sea shell, always boring against the rock, might do. The making of the place had been her pain. But now the shell was safely in the rock. It was lodged, and ground no longer. "
― T.H. White , The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-4)
2 " Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius. "
― Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
3 " Were these boys in their right minds? Here were two boys with good intellect, one eighteen and one nineteen. They had all the prospects that life could hold out for any of the young; one a graduate of Chicago and another of Ann Arbor; one who had passed his examination for the Harvard Law School and was about to take a trip in Europe,--another who had passed at Ann Arbor, the youngest in his class, with three thousand dollars in the bank. Boys who never knew what it was to want a dollar; boys who could reach any position that was to boys of that kind to reach; boys of distinguished and honorable families, families of wealth and position, with all the world before them. And they gave it all up for nothing, for nothing! They took a little companion of one of them, on a crowded street, and killed him, for nothing, and sacrificed everything that could be of value in human life upon the crazy scheme of a couple of immature lads.Now, your Honor, you have been a boy; I have been a boy. And we have known other boys. The best way to understand somebody else is to put yourself in his place.Is it within the realm of your imagination that a boy who was right, with all the prospects of life before him, who could choose what he wanted, without the slightest reason in the world would lure a young companion to his death, and take his place in the shadow of the gallows?...No one who has the process of reasoning could doubt that a boy who would do that is not right.How insane they are I care not, whether medically or legally. They did not reason; they could not reason; they committed the most foolish, most unprovoked, most purposeless, most causeless act that any two boys ever committed, and they put themselves where the rope is dangling above their heads....Why did they kill little Bobby Franks?Not for money, not for spite; not for hate. They killed him as they might kill a spider or a fly, for the experience. They killed him because they were made that way. Because somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man something slipped, and those unfortunate lads sit here hated, despised, outcasts, with the community shouting for their blood.. . . I know, Your Honor, that every atom of life in all this universe is bound up together. I know that a pebble cannot be thrown into the ocean without disturbing every drop of water in the sea. I know that every life is inextricably mixed and woven with every other life. I know that every influence, conscious and unconscious, acts and reacts on every living organism, and that no one can fix the blame. I know that all life is a series of infinite chances, which sometimes result one way and sometimes another. I have not the infinite wisdom that can fathom it, neither has any other human brain "
― Clarence Darrow , Attorney for the Damned: Clarence Darrow in the Courtroom
4 " Are you not ashamed of caring so much for the making of money and for fame and prestige, when you neither think nor care about wisdom and truth and the improvement of your soul? "
― Socrates
5 " Imagination is not, as some poets have thought, simply synonymous with good. It may be either good or evil. As long as art remained primarily mimetic, the evil which imagination could do was limited by nature. Again, as long as it was treated as an amusement, the evil which it could do was limited in scope. But in an age when the connection between imagination and figuration is beginning to be dimly realized, when the fact of the directionally creator relation is beginning to break through into consciousness, both the good and the evil latent in the working of imagination begin to appear unlimited. We have seen in the Romantic movement an instance of the way in which the making of images may react upon the collective representations. It is a fairly rudimentary instance, but even so it has already gone beyond the dreams and responses of a leisured few. The economic and social structure of Switzerland is noticeably affected by its tourist industry, and that is due only in part to increased facilities of travel. It is due not less to the condition that (whatever may be said about their ‘particles’) the mountains which twentieth-century man sees are not the mountains which eighteenth-century man saw.It may be objected that this is a very small matter, and that it will be a long time before the imagination of man substantially alters those appearances of nature with which his figuration supplies him. But then I am taking the long view. Even so, we need not be too confident. Even if the pace of change remained the same, one who is really sensitive to (for example) the difference between the medieval collective representations and our own will be aware that, without traveling any greater distance than we have come since the fourteenth century, we could very well move forward into a chaotically empty or fantastically hideous world. But the pace of change has not remained the same. It has accelerated and is accelerating. We should remember this, when appraising the aberrations of the formally representational arts. Of course, in so far as these are due to affectation, they are of no importance. But in so far as they are genuine, they are genuine because the artist has in some way or other experienced the world he represents. And in so far as they are appreciated, they are appreciated by those who are themselves willing to make a move towards seeing the world in that way, and, ultimately therefore, seeing that kind of world. We should remember this, when we see pictures of a dog with six legs emerging from a vegetable marrow or a woman with a motorbicycle substituted for her left breast. "
― Owen Barfield
6 " America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way. "
― Ayn Rand
7 " Human social life, I suggest, is the magma that erupts and builds up, so to speak, at the fault lines where natural human capacities meet and grind against and over natural human limitations…. This meeting of powers and limitations produces a creative, dynamic tension and energy that generates and fuels the making of human social life and social structures…. It is real human persons living through the tensions of natural existential contradictions who construct patterned social meanings, interactions, institutions, and structures. "
― Christian Smith , What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up
8 " We could say that the human race is a great coauthorship in which we are collaborating with God and nature in the making of ourselves and one another. From this there is no escape. We may collaborate either well or poorly or we may refuse to collaborate, but even to refuse to collaborate is to exert an influence and to affect the quality of the product. This is only a way of saying that by ourselves we have no meaning and no dignity; by ourselves we are outside the human definition, outside our identity. "
― Wendell Berry , The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
9 " Poetry is an act of peace. Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread. "
― Pablo Neruda
10 " ...much of poetry in the making is the fiddle with a few items. You lay a word against another and wait. You try another word. And another. Yet another. You wait. You begin again. Listening. Looking. For the elusive inevitable thing which has to arrive before it is recognised. And, like Odysseus, may not be recognised at first. "
― Craig Raine , Heartbreak
11 " If I could sum up my poetry in a few well-chosen words, the result might be a poem. Several years ago, when I was asked to say something on this topic, I came up with the notion that for me the making of poems is both a commemoration (a moment captured) and an evocation (the archaeologist manqué side of me digging into something buried and bringing it to light). But I also said that I find the processes that bring poems into being mysterious, and I wouldn't really wish to know them; the thread that links the first unwilled impulse to the object I acknowledge as the completed poem is a tenuous one, easily broken. If I knew the answers to these riddles, I would write more poems, and better ones. " Simple Poem" is as close as I can get to a credo':Simple PoemI shall make it simple so you understand.Making it simple will make it clear for me.When you have read it, take me by the handAs children do, loving simplicity.This is the simple poem I have made.Tell me you understand. But when you doDon't ask me in return if I have saidAll that I meant, or whether it is true. "
12 " I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel. "
― Terry Pratchett
13 " Is being burnt a requisite for the making of art? Personally, I don't think it is. But art is poultice for a burn. It is a privilege to have, somewhere within you, a capacity for making something speak from your own seared experience. "
― Molly Peacock , The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life's Work at 72
14 " [A]ll knowledge goes through both stages, the annunciation out of noise into fact, and the disintegration back into noise again. The process involved was the making of increasingly finer distinctions. The outcome was an endless series of theoretical catastrophes. "
― James Blish , A Case of Conscience (After Such Knowledge, #4)
15 " We seek only a place in our nations space future w/o discrimination. We ask as citizens of this nation to be allowed to participate with seriousness & sincerity in the making of history now…we offer you 13 women pilot volunteers. "
16 " There are very few things that live in both this world and the world of dreams. Most are gods, angels and demons. The Stone you hold was made by Vlad Valkire the son of an angel and a demon. By the divine blood that ran in his veins, Valkire could see the light and hear the song of creation -- if only as glimmerings and whispers. " Over time, he became aware of the light and the music and as he grew so did his understanding of it. At the age of twenty two, he began his greatest labor -- the making of the Wyrd Stones. In them he captured the light and song of creation and by them some of the powers of gods, angels and demons fell into the hands of elves and men. A sorcerer who knows its secret may -- like a god, angel, or demon -- stand with one foot in this world and another within the world of dreams. " Your Stone is a gateway into the world of dreams, Luthiel. When you sing, it opens and you are, in part, taken there. Others who hold a Wyrd Stone like yours may know when someone crosses into dream. When you sang, I could hear you quite clearly. "
17 " Please Note:Although it is true that some havebeen captured; we would like toassure you that no thoughts, orimages, have been harmed during the making of this book. "
18 " I had no vote in the making of such a law, and I have no intention of abiding by it, either. "
19 " It was not my intention - it never was - to invent a character who should speak for me, the author, in person. A character is in a story to fill a role there, and the character's life along with its expression of life is defined by that surrounding - indeed is created by its own story. Yet, it seems to me now, years after I wrote The Golden Apples, that I did bring forth a character with whom I came to feel oddly in touch. She derived from what I already knew for myself, even felt I had always known. What I have put into her is my passion for my own life work, my own art. Exposing yourself to risk is a truth that Mrs. Eckhart and I had in common. What animates and possesses me is what drives Mrs. Eckhart, the love of her art and the love of giving it, the desire to give it until there is no more left. Of course any writer is in part all of his characters. How otherwise would they be known to him, occur to him, become what they are? In the making of her character out of my most inward and most deeply felt self, I would say I have found my voice in my own fiction. "
― Eudora Welty , On Writing
20 " ...'To the making of many books there is no end, and much devotion to them is wearisome to the flesh.'– Ecclesiastes 12:12 "