The real voyage of discovery consists of not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
- Marcel Proust
The country habit has me by the heart,
For he's bewitched forever who has seen,
Not with his eyes but with his vision, Spring
Flow down the woods and stipple leaves with sun.
- Vita Sackville-West
Colours change: in the morning light, red shines out bright and clear and the blues merge into their surroundings, melting into the greens; but by the evening the reds loose their piquancy, embracing a quieter tone and shifting toward the blues in the rainbow. Yellow flowers remain bright, and white ones become luminous, shining like ghostly figures against a darkening green background.
- Rosemary Verey, The Scented Garden, 1981
Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level
with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
- Henry David Thoreau
One sees great things from the valley,
only small things from the peak.
- G. K. Chesterton
Life just seems so full of connections. Most of the time we don't even pay attention to the depth of life. We only see flat surfaces.
- Colin Neenan
To see what is in front of one's nose
needs a constant struggle.
- George Orwell
Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind;
and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.
- William Shakespeare
No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
- Elizabeth Bowen
The eyes are the gateway to the soul.
- Herman Melville
The eyes are the window of the soul.
- English Proverb
I shut my eyes in order to see.
- Paul Gauguin
Finally, I realized what makes my garden exciting is me. Living in it every day, participating minutely in each small event, I see with doubled and redoubled vision. Where friends notice a solitary hummingbird pricking the salvia flowers, I recall a season's worth of hummingbird battles.
- Janice Emily Bowers, A Full Life in a Small Place, 1993
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
- William James
The soul that can speak with its eyes can also kiss with a gaze.
- Author Unknown
9 comments:
Nice selection. Now pick one and write from it.
Dang, I'm bossy.
Shit, man, I'm sorry. Just ignore me.
okay. consider yourself ignored, dudet.
Actually, I never really liked writing from prompts, especially quotes. Who knows why I guess.
Except, you know, I was once attacked by a Prompt. Very ugly fight.
Happened on my Prompt Night.
Writing tip #14 -
"Quote someone who wrote somthing that one time before beginning your novel, your chapter, your paragraph, or even before the sentence. This will help establish the mood, your character's mindset, or just enable you to put some shit in that you thought was cool."
My favorite quote re: vision:
"In the country of the blind the one eyed man is king"
Desiderius Erasmus (click here
for more cool Erasmus quotes.
Erasmus was an amazing dude. Like Voix, he was a committed Catholic who nonetheless found many things to criticize about the Catholic Church.
He was an influence on Martin Luther and a friend of Thomas More.
Question: did Erasmus invent the eraser?
Where do I get the kind of eyes that make the inside of my cubicle look like a Jamaican beach?
I'm glad you asked, Cavu. Some people say inhalents, others prefer heroin. I, personally, have taken a vow of semi-poverty and have choosen not to dwell in a cubicle at all, and at night I hunt rabbit through the streets of St. Paul to suppliment my part-time income. Perhaps you could live on a steady diet of Ectasy?
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