47 Quotes by Lynne Tillman

Reality disappoints regularly. When people are supposed to have fun, it’s likely they won’t, because fun can’t live up to its image. Does anything live up to its image?

Estranged mountains bulged under the sky, the big sky, the endless sky. Anyway, no one could see an end to it, which reassured her, since so much seemed to be coming to an end. It felt that way.But it seemed impossible---the universe dropping off, ending, there would be an end, and then there would be nothing, a no more, a vacuum of no more. Her imagination couldn’t let her go there.

Faced with the unfamiliar, we the public have been trained to rely on museums, like schools, to serve up art and culture like pieces of pie: little wedges of esthetics, criticism, politics and history.

We do not select the stories we write, we do not pick the voices. They take us by surprise and we surrender to them. They write us, they write in us, all over us, through us. They occupy us. We are, in a sense, puppets--to language, with language.

Once history holds your hand, it never lets go. But it has an anxious grip and takes you places you couldn’t expect.

Courage in an artist or writer is different from the courage of firefighters, who rescue people and risk their own lives. Artistic courage might be conceptualized as an internal drama about overcoming rules or inhibitions, dicta of all kinds, the art a manifestation or result of a multitude of processes.

No escape from patterns and systems, no exits. Nothing, and no one, resides outside a system; that’s the way it is. Nothing outside the inside, the inside is also outside, etc.

Before 1802, cirrus, cumulus, and altostratus clouds hadn’t been given names. Untitled before 1802, the shapes were present in the sky, ethereal or ephemeral, presumably since the big bang, but un-designated, until they needed to be. Why then?The world hasn’t been fully seen, until it is named.

The desire to catch, as Bonnard hoped, the PASSING MOMENT is antithetical to being in the moment. The photographer is an observer to others’ moments. The Picture People have dedicated themselves to this paradox, and consign themselves on either side of the equation.