Sculptors

"There's a hardness I'm seeing in modern people. Those little moments of goofiness that used to make the day pass seem to have gone. Life's so serious now."

"Her friends have become who they've become by default. Their dreams are forgotten, or were never formulated to begin with."

"There's nothing at the center of what we do."

"Nobody believes the identities we've made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now - as though people had true cores once, but hucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow."

"At twenty you know you're not going to be a rock star... by twenty-five you know you're not going to be a dentist or a professional... by thirty, a darkness starts moving in - you wonder if you're ever going to be fulfilled, let alone wealthy or successful... by thirty-five, you know, basically, what you're going to be doing the rest of your life; you become resigned to your fate."

"We had all awakened X number of years past our youth feeling sleazy and harsh. Choices still existed, but they were no longer infinite. Fun had become a scrim, concealing the hysteria that lay behind it."

"At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities - to clarify just who it is we really are?"

"Destiny is what we work toward. The future doesn't exist yet. Fate is for losers."

"We are at the vanguard of adolescent protraction."

"Language is such a technology."

"I used to always think I had to have a reason to record my observations of the day, or even my emotions, but now I think simply being alive is more than enough reason."

"I told Ethan that I speak in an unrestricted manner to animals—things like, aren't you just the cutest little kitty... that kind of thing, which I wouldn't dream of doing to humans. Then I realized I wish I could."

"The two of you start talking about your feelings and your feelings float outside of you like vapors, and they mix together like a fog. Before you realize it, the two of you have become the same mist and you realize you can never return to being just a lone cloud again, because the isolation would be intolerable."

"...when you're in love, all of your doors are open, and all of their doors are open. And you roller-skate down your halls together."

"What is the one thing more than any other thing that makes one person different from any other person?"

"I'm trying to feel more well adjusted than I really am, which is, I guess, the human condition."

"Compromise is said to be the way of the world and yet I find myself feeling sick trying to accept what it has done to me."

"...I realized that once people are broken in certain ways they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one."

"Is feeling nothing the inevitable result of believing in nothing? ...I thought it would be such a sick joke to have to remain alive for decades and not believe in or feel anything."

"I realized a capacity for not feeling lonely carried a very real price, which was the threat of feeling nothing at all."

"When you're young you always feel that life hasn't yet begun...But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive."

"I thought that intimacy with another soul was the closest I could ever come to leaving my body."

"Technology does not always equal progress."

"Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounded like a quiet tragedy."

"Your own nature will triumph. We are all born with our natures... And I think back over my life and I realize that my own nature -the core me- essentially hasn't changed over all these years. When I wake up in the morning, for those first few moments before I remember where I am or when I am, I still feel the same way I did when I woke up at the age of five."

"Beauty is the purgation of superfluities."

"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it."

"Recollect that trifles make perfection, and that perfection is no trifle."

"I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free."

"A quel pietoso fonte, onde siam tutti, S'assembra ogni beltà che qua si vede, Più c'altra cosa alle persone accorte;"

"As when, O lady mine, With chiseled touch The stone unhewn and cold Becomes a living mold, The more the marble wastes, The more the statue grows."

"I was never the kind of painter or sculptor who kept a shop."

"Your lordship, only worldly light in this age of ours, you can never be pleased with another man's work for there is no man who resembles you, nor one to equal you … It grieves me greatly that I cannot recapture my past, so as to longer be at your service. As it is, I can only offer you my future, which is short, for I am too old … That is all I have to say. Read my heart for "the quill cannot express good will.""

"If one day, reasoning absurdly, Michelangelo's belonging to Freemasonry were to emerge, then should that wonder of the Last Judgment be hidden inside the Sistine Chapel? Or, in the case of Leonardo da Vinci, the Last Supper in Santa Maria delle Grazie?"

"Enough, enough, enough! Say no more! Lump the whole thing! say the Creator made Italy from designs by Michael Angelo!"

"Thus to the plain man there may be no metaphor in Aristotle's "substance", Descartes' "machine of nature," Newtonian "force" and "attraction," Thomas Young's "kinetic energy" and Michelangelo's figure of Leda. Placed in their customary contexts these present nothing to him but the face of literal truth. To the initiated, however, who are aware of the "gross original" senses as well as the now literal senses , they may become metaphors. There are no metaphors per se...."

"Who can measure the worth of a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo or Beethoven in dollars and cents?"

"To make something is to invent or discover it. Michelangelo cuts away the extra marble that hides the statue, right?"

"...he was a good man, but he did not know how to paint."

"No one who has not seen the Sistine Chapel can have a clear idea of what a human being can achieve. ... The master's inner security and strength, his greatness is beyond all description. ... At the moment I am so engrossed by Michelangelo that even Nature makes no appeal to me, for my vision is so small compared with his. If there were only some means of fixing such pictures in one's soul!"

"Interviewer: The examination of two emotional journeys, namely those concerning the artist's relationships with Tommaso de' Cavalieri and Vittoria Colonna, proved to be very interesting. Graziella Magherini: Buonarroti dedicated some very beautiful sonnets to Tommaso, written in the Neoplatonic style, with a refined sensitivity that was an integral part of Florentine Humanism. However, psychoanalytic observation reveals clear homoerotic feelings, albeit disguised. The comparison with the drawings that the artist gave to the young man is extraordinary. I am referring to The Rape of Ganymede, The Punishment of Titus and The Bacchanalia of the Putti. These are truly eloquent works. There are two versions of ‘Ganymede’: in the first, Ganymede resists Zeus in an ambivalent mix of desire and fear, while in the second he offers himself in sweet abandon, in an attitude pervaded by ecstasy and bliss. In The Punishment of Titus, the protagonist, struck by the eagle, becomes a metaphor for Michelangelo's sense of guilt. But even more extraordinary is the drawing with the Bacchanalia of the Putti. Here we are faced with an expression of regressed levels. Naked children linger in bacchanalia, dragging a dead deer here, carrying a pig there; a child urinates in a wine jug; young people are lost, without dignity... In the lower part of the work, the contrast is striking. There is a naked man sleeping uncovered, in an atmosphere of profound sadness, in a pose that closely resembles, for example, the Drunken Moses in the istine Chapel; and there is a hideous female satyr with flaccid breasts. What emerges clearly is a depressed paternal role on the one hand, and a sense of emptied motherhood on the other, in an almost phallic mother figure that combines the male and female roles. In short, the drawings are direct, sensorial: unlike the sonnets, which, as I mentioned, also contain an underlying materiality of the flesh."

"Do we not say that the judicious discovering of a most lovely Statua in a piece of Marble, hath sublimated the wit of Buonarruotti far above the vulgar wits of other men? And yet this work is onely the imitation of a meer aptitude and disposition of exteriour and superficial mem­bers of an immoveable man; but what is it in comparison of a man made by nature, composed of as many exteriour and inte­riour members, of so many muscles, tendons, nerves, bones, which serve to so many and sundry motions? but what shall we say of the senses, and of the powers of the soul, and lastly, of the understanding? May we not say, and that with reason, that the structure of a Statue falls far short of the formation of a living man, yea more of a contemptible worm?"

"Italians have such illustrious people they can celebrate, that everyone celebrates — Michelangelo, Vivaldi and, of course, for us on the left, Sacco and Vanzetti."

"Ancora Imparo."

"What do you despise? By this you are truly known."

"If you knew how much work went into it, you would not call it genius."

"If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all."

"That state is a state of Slavery in which a man does what he likes to do in his spare time and in his working time that which is required of him. This state can only exist when what a man likes to do is to please himself. ¶ That state is a state of Freedom in which a man does what he likes to do in his working time and in his spare time that which is required of him. This state can only exist when what a man likes to do is to please God."

"Of patience there is this to be said. To be patient is to suffer. By their fruits men know one another, but by their sufferings they are what they are. And suffering is not merely the endurance of physical or mental anguish, but of joy also. A rabbit caught in a trap may be supposed to suffer physical anguish : but it suffers nothing else. The man crucified may be supposed to suffer physical & mental anguish, but he suffers also intense happiness and joy. The industrialist workman is often simply as a rabbit in a trap ; the artist is often as a man nailed to a cross. In patience souls are possessed. No lower view of the matter will suffice."

":[This sentence also occurs in Hundertwasser's manifesto "On the Paradise Destroyed by the Straight Line" (1985).]"