“We must recognize our particular form, the instrument that each of us who carries anything – carries in his being. Mastering this instrument, learning to play it to perfection – that’s what I call duty, what I call conduct, what I call success.” Henry James, The Tragic Muse
“… so that the presentation will lay hold on the emotions as human experience – will, as you say, ‘flash’ conviction on the world by means of aroused sympathy.” George Eliot to Frederic Harrison, 1866
“I think I occupy the centre, but nothing is less certain.” Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable
“Exactitude winged by intuition.” Paul Klee
“The curve is subsumed… in those unstraight lines.” Michael Harrison
“The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation, by hushing us with an alluring monotony, while it holds us waking by variety, to keep us in that stage of perhaps real trance, in which the mind, liberated from the pressure of the will, is unfolded in symbols.” Yeats, ‘The Symbolism of Poetry’
“… where virtuosity – to no end – is the principle of life, when a thousand variations of three simple movements fill up the time…” Hugh Kenner on Beckett, 1961
“To conceal intention under an appearance of dreamlike fortuity.” Frank Kermode on Beckett
‘These are not ritual rules but physical laws.’ Clark Coolidge on Beckett’s Quad
“The line of gravity can sometimes be curved (it’s very mysterious); it’s the path taken by the soul of the dancer.” LK quoting von Kleist’s ‘On the Marionette Theatre’