I think there’s something really painful about your identity being entirely composed of ghosts. For me, I didn’t want to be this kid whose Dominicanness was something caught utterly in the past, is an abstraction, the thing that I write about. Instead I wanted it to be, first and foremost, a thing that I lived.
The Why’s of suffering keep us shrouded in a seemingly bottomless void of abstraction where God is reduced to a finite ethical agent, a limited psychological personality, whose purposes measure on the same scale as ours.
Washington isn’t a city, it’s an abstraction.
Why must art be static? You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an entirely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect, but it is always still. The next step in sculpture is motion.
As a storyteller, I realize that because of the inherent abstraction in rhythm, the possible interpretations are plenty. But that only makes the work more challenging.
Calling a book ‘young adult’ is only important in that it can help get a book to the right reader. After that, it’s a useless abstraction and should be discarded.
Enjoying art is a personal matter. It’s made up by contemplation, silence, abstraction.
Reflection is only a partial understanding of truth if it does not translate itself in practice into commitments to the common good and justice. Truth is not mere abstraction but something to be done and is only apprehended when this is realized.
The ideal trademark is one that is pushed to its utmost limits in terms of abstraction and ambiguity, yet is still readable.
I have a hard time with abstractions. I always go to the personal.
Experts are able to identify patterns related to a specific problem relevant to their area of knowledge. But because nonexperts lack that base of knowledge, they are forced to rely more on their brain’s ability for abstraction rather than specificity.
My job is to return abstraction to the people: in a sense, to popularize it without lowering the bar, which is a lot easier said than done.
Our lives don’t make sense in abstraction, only when compared with the lives of others.
In my state of spiritual abstraction, I no longer belong to myself and to my eyesight. I am nothing more than a single narrow gasping lung, floating over the mists and summits.
So the universe is constantly moving in the direction of higher evolutionary impulses, creativity, abstraction, and meaning.
Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.
In ‘Self Comes to Mind’ I pay a lot of attention to simple creatures without brains or minds, because those ‘cartooned abstractions of who we are’ operate on precisely the same principles that we do.
The Geometer has the special privilege to carry out, by abstraction, all constructions by means of the intellect. Who, then, would wish to prevent me from freely considering figures hanging on a balance imagined to be at an infinite distance beyond the confines of the world?
Sometimes, we use the term ‘growth’ as a number and sometimes as an abstraction, but the underlying implication is always that, if the country grows at a certain rate, at the end there will be a pot of gold for everyone.
Chimps can do all sorts of things we thought that only we could do – like tool-making and abstraction and generalisation. They can learn a language – sign language – and they can use the signs. But when you think of our intellects, even the brightest chimp looks like a very small child.
I work in colour sometimes, but I guess the images I most connect to, historically speaking, are in black and white. I see more in black and white – I like the abstraction of it.
An artist is always thinking of something else. My father was like that. He had this feeling of abstraction, and I do, too.
It took me twenty years to get Steven Parrino’s work. From the time I first saw his art, in the mid-eighties, I almost always dismissed it as mannered, Romantic, formulaic, conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction.
Abstraction and representation are supposed to be going down two very different paths, one sociological and the other aesthetic.
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