Jean Nouvel

"Modernity is making the best use of our memory and moving ahead as fast as we can in terms of development"

"In todays modernity, what takes priority is the aesthetic of the miracle"

"we cannot refuse to add our own. It is indeed our responsibility to continue constructing it. "

"There are fundamental differences between architecture and design....The first is the fact that architecture is unique and can only be specific, wehreas design is the creation of multiples aimed at the multitude of individuals. The second is that architecture conveys a sense of the present; it will be up to future generations and the buildings that will be constructed around them whether or not it rematins meaningful. In the case of design, the reverse is true: design will be situated in different contexts, surrounded by objects unknown to it. In the case of architecture, the object is static. In the case of design, the object moves in space and time."

"we can create more than we see"

"architecture creates a virtual space or a mental space; it's a way of tricking the senses. But it's primarily a way of preserving a destabalized area."

"three quarters of the time architecture is not marked by any intentionallity'

"If being a nihilist is being obsessed by the mode of disappearance rather than the mode of production, then I'm a nihilist"

"we have experienced a kind of urban big bang and find that we are unable to use the existing recipes"

"we're required to constantly diagnose the situation, required to face the fact that architecture is no longer the invention of a world but that it exists simply with respet to a geologial layer applied to all the cities throughout the planet...architecture can no longer have as its goal the transformation, modification, of this accumulated material"

"I think through small movements we can achieve an ethics whereby the situation becomes slightly more positive each time we intervene. We can try to locate a kind of enjoyment of place by including things that weren't considered previously, which are frequently accidental, and inventing stratagies of improvement, the poetics of situations: we can evaluate completely random elements and declare that we're dealing with geography: "it's beautiful. I'm going to reveal it to you..." This is an aesthetics of revelation, a way of taking a piece of the world and saying, "I'm appropriating this, and I'm giving it back to you for your appreciation in a different way."

The Sight of Death (T.J. Clark)

"...the splitting itself I do not apologize for. It is a tactic-a necessity-born from the horrors of the times. And better by far a splitting-an admission of the 'political' and the 'aesthetic' as at present the torn halves of a totality...than the alternative currently on offer in so much of the left academy. Which is to say, a constant cursory hauling of visual (and verbal) images before the court of political judgment"

"I was a writer about painting, and therefore inevitably looking for an incident, an interruption in the visual fabric, on which words could fasten and begin."

"I approve of luminous concreteness. Something in me flinches from the glamor of always probing deeper as looker...One part of me goes to paintings precisely for their self sufficiency, their removal from the world of wishes. "

"astonishing things happen if one gives oneself over to the process of seeing again and again...and slowly the question arises: What is it, fundamentally, I am returning to in this particular case? What is it I want to see again?"

"Can it be that there are certain kinds of visual configuration, or incident, or play of analogy, that simply cannot be retained in the memory, or fully integrated into a disposable narrative of interpretation; so that only the physical, literal, dumb act of receiving the array on the retina will satisfy the mind?"

"Don't we go back to it because we sense that in it is re-enacted a death or terror we would all like to experience again in this harmless, ordered, palliative mode?"

"I want the whole record of reptition-compulsion"

"one kind of corrective to dogma is looking itself, pursued long enough."

"Aren't there plenty of moments in life that, whether they last or not, have enough permanence about them to stand for things as they are, things as the mind conceives them-and not just to stand for them notionally?"

"How does a momentary stopping of an action, or state of the weather-come to speak to structure or persistence? What features of the momentary can be frozen without forcing?"

Hitch 22

The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews,
Not to be born is the best for man;
The second-best is a formal order,
The dance's pattern; dance while you can.

Dance, dancefor the figure is easy,
The tune is catching and will not stop;
Dance till the stars come down from the rafters;
Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
-Auden

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of the Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.
-Richard Dawkins Unweaving the Rainbow

"Until you have done something for humanity, you should be ashamed to die." Well, how is one to stand that test?

nothing reminds one of impending extinction more than the growth of ones own children, for whom room must be made, and who are in fact one's only hint of even a tincture of a hope of immortality.

I personally want to 'do' death in the active and not the passive, and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me.

the fear of death distresses me- and I would not trust anyone who had not felt something like it

...if you felt strong enough about somebody and learned to take their desires, too, into account, the resulting mutuality and reciprocity would be much more than merely worthwhile.

alcohol for me has been an aspect of my optimisn

"Finally, brethren, whasoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think of these things."

if you have to try to persuade yourself of something, you are probably already very much inclined to doubt or distrust it.

Wallace Stevens

Q: "As a poet what distinguishes you, do you think, from an ordinary man?"
A: "An inability to see much point to the life of an ordinary man. The chances are an ordinary man himself sees very little point to it." [Wallace Stevens, responding to 'Enquiry' questionnaire]

"To me poetry is one of the sanctions of life and I write it because it helps me to accept and validate my experience." [Partisan Review Questionnaire]

Eliot/Herakleitos

"The way upward and the way downward are the same."
1. p.89. Fr.60

Eliot/Herakleitos

Although logos is common to all, most people live
as if they had a wisdom of their own

Shaw

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." [George Bernard Shaw]

MacIntyre

"What deprives us of the knowledge of God also deprives us of self-knowledge: an indefinite capacity for distraction by external trivialities and a craving for self justification, so that we either do not attend to what is within or, if we do, disguise from ourselves our thoughts and motives." [MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities]