Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Novels can fill in the spaces about what that emotional resonance is.

It is in man's heart that the life of nature's spectacle exists; to see it, one must feel it.

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.

I'm a romantic. The impressionists have always been my favorites. I like prettiness - beauty, or what I perceive as beauty.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.

When I read Andrew Motion's biography, I wept. It's something about the purity of the story and how fresh it was because of the love letters Keats wrote.

You know, the point of a novel - or to me, the point of a novel, the gift of a novel is to go really deeply inside people's lives and inside their personal experiences.

Different people get different things out of the images. It doesn't matter what it's about, all that matters is how it makes you feel.

I don't feel like literature has the power to alienate. I think that's something people feel if they don't connect with a work of art. But I don't think a work of art can actively reject the person who's looking at it or reading it.

I don't know why, it's the same reason why you like some music and you don't like others. There's something about it that you like. Ultimately I don't find it's in my best interests to try and analyze it, since it's fundamentally emotional.

How can you say when you're attracted to something? It's not easy to articulate my tastes.

I was a kid when I read Jane Eyre and fell in love with that universe. I didn't have the acumen to say the prose is old or the prose is too complex. I just fell in love with Jane's very lonely soul, much the same way I fell in love with Frankenstein's creature for the same reason. Those old souls exist in every decade in every century.

Music is very abstract. When we talk about music, we're not discussing the music itself but rather how we react to it.

I love to zoom in and study why a chord is making me feel a certain way, but then I've learnt to zoom out again. Because if I'm not actually feeling it, there's not much point making it in the first place.

I just hold out for pieces where I immediately feel an emotional connection with a part.

The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.

The novel is a perfect medium for revealing to us the changing rainbow of our living relationships. The novel can help us to live,as nothing else can: no didactic Scripture, anyhow. If the novelist keeps his thumb out of the pan.

I don't know why people see the things that they do. I wouldn't pay to see them, they don't touch me or move me in any way.

The truth is that art does not teach; it makes you feel, and any teaching that may arise from the feeling is an extra, and must not be stressed too much. In the modern world, and in Canada as much as anywhere, we are obsessed with the notion that to think is the highest achievement of mankind, but we neglect the fact that thought untouched by feeling is thin, delusive, treacherous stuff.

I loved this smart, funny, big-hearted novel. As hilarious and wise as early Philip Roth, The Mathematician's Shiva will delight and move you.

Without emotion there is no beauty

Poetry, she thought, wasn't written to be analyzed; it was meant to inspire without reason, to touch without understanding.

the art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remains private, and cannot be communicated to others.

For even satire is a form of sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.

A great work of art is one that truly moves and inspires you. You yourself must be moved. Don't look at art with others' eyes. Don't listen to music with others' ears. You must react to art with your own feelings, your own heart and mind.