Quotes of Note

Some snippets I've copied into my notebook over the past couple of months...

'there's nothing we own that isn't mortal
save talent, the spark in the mind' - Ovid, Letters from Exile
(Initially I read 'mortal' as 'moral' - as if talent were too true a quality to be subject to society's arbitrary standards. Long live talent.)

And some more mortality:
'Photography is the inventory of mortality.' - Susan Sontag, 'Melancholy Objects' in On Photography

And some more photography (I wish I had an essay to put this into; I miss you, uni):
'By disclosing the thingness of human beings, the humanness of things, photography transforms reality into a tautology. When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.' - Susan Sontag again, 'The Heroism of Vision'


On a barrelful of fish:
'It was the strangest sight, all those live things busy in there, like a little ocean that had come on the train.' - Raymond Carver, 'The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off'

'He brought her a large yellow dahlia, which she grasped tightly in one hand and regarded with a stare of benevolent boredom, such as one might bestow on amateur classical dancing performed in aid of a deserving charity.' - Saki, 'The Penance'

And more of Saki's long-winded but apt imagery:
'Laploshka said nothing, but his eyes bulged a little and his cheeks took on the mottled hues of an ethnographical map of the Balkan Peninsula.' - Saki, 'The Soul of Laploshka'

And something from James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime which admittedly seems a bit trite taken out of context. You should read the book. Here's the bit I wrote down, anyway:
'Solitude. One knows instinctively it has benefits that must be more deeply satisfying than those of other conditions, but still it is difficult. And besides, how is one to distinguish between conditions which are valuable, which despite their hatefulness give us strength or impel us to great things and others we would be far better free of? Which are precious and which are not? Why is it so hard to be happy alone? Why is it impossible?'

'Nothing? Nothing, tra la la?' - David Bowie in Labyrinth