24 Quotes by Blue Balliett

Language was a code, like numbers, he said, and depended just as much on rhythm for its power.

I love the way a list makes a big hodgepodge of things simmer down and behave.

Crash, from the Russian krashenina Noun: a rough fabric sometimes used to strengthen the spine of a book.

Every book is a box of ideas.

What was a foreigner, anyway? Is the place you’re born the only place you really belong? At what point do you stop being from “away” and start being from “here”?

She wouldn’t be helpless, not ever, not if she could see a way out. She wouldn’t allow that to happen. She could see that being helpless in a situation like this was dangerously close to becoming just plain less.

You will come to agree with me.

Picasso said that art is a lie, but a lie that tells the truth”... Calder wondered what Picasso had meant. Was it that art wasn’t exactly the real world, but it said something real?

Perhaps Calder’s secret lies in the idea that each mobile is, truly, a metaphor for the experience of living, for the interconnected movement of separate elements that make up a life. Each mobile tells us to stop, to wonder, to wonder some more, and to celebrate.