Peony > Peony's Quotes

“Lips trembling, Aram asked, “So it wasn’t my fault?” “Your fault?” His mother looked tormented by emotion. “How could you say such a thing? How could you ever think it was your fault?” “I thought maybe he couldn’t love me,” Aram said. “Because of the way I am.” His mother scooted back her chair and hurried around the table, coming to kneel at his side. “No. Oh, gods, no.” She took him into her arms, rocking him slowly as her tears mingled with his own. “Your father loved you more than anything in the world.” Hearing that made Aram cry harder. He clung to her with all the strength and conviction of a son’s love for his mother. It was several minutes before she let him go, but even then, it was much too soon. His mother drew back and kissed him on the cheek.”
― M.L. Spencer, Dragon Mage

“He hadn’t known how attached he’d become to Aram until the end. But now, after all they’d been through together, he felt as though he were losing a little brother. A very brave little brother, who had saved his life by putting his own body between him and dragonfire.”
― M.L. Spencer, Dragon Mage

“Aram was alive. Alive. For four years, he’d been kept alive and in agony. Everything they’d told him, everything Markus thought he knew, it was all just lies to keep him in line, to keep Aram suffering… He’d spent the last four years doing everything these bastards had told him, grieving for a friend he should have been saving. He’d let Aram suffer down there for four years. Four. Years. He stayed there, shaking, until the sun set behind the trees and the cool silence of twilight fell around him. Then he stood and stumbled back toward the dormitory, his mind too strangled for thought.”
― M.L. Spencer, Dragon Mage

“The world makes of us what it will, and it doesn’t give a damn about what we want. If we’re lucky, we’ll look back from our deathbeds and find that our lives were lived for a purpose. But more often than not, all we’ll see is a long list of missed opportunities.”
― M.L. Spencer, Dragon Mage

“As Calise entered, she couldn’t help staring at the walls as she crossed the room. She had never been inside the Dedicant Mother’s quarters before and had never seen the rich tapestries Luvana owned, which told the story of the world—not the history of it but, rather, the wonder.”
― M.L. Spencer, Dragon Mage

“He could see the flames of ire and the ice of vengeance in the eyes of each of the young men surrounding him, and he knew that every one of them would have made the same promise in his place.”
― M.L. Spencer, Dragon Mage

“How would Jasnah react, now that her ward had finally caught up to her? Would she be angry because of Shallan’s tardiness? Shallan couldn’t be blamed for that, but people often expect irrational things from their inferiors.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“Life before Death.
Strength before Weakness.
Journey before Destination.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“Strength does not make one capable of rule; it makes one capable of service.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“Overcome your guilt. Care, but not too much. Take responsibility, but don't blame yourself. Protect, save, help- but know when to give up. They're precarious ledges to walk. How do I do it?”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“Ignorance is hardly unusual, Miss Davar. The longer I live, the more I come to realize that it is the natural state of the human mind. There are many who will strive to defend its sanctity and then expect you to be impressed with their efforts.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“Combat begins with the legs,” Kaladin said as he evaded the attacks. “I don’t care how fast you are with a jab, how accurate you are with a thrust. If your opponent can trip you, or make you stumble, you’ll lose. Losing means dying.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“Everyone hates being wrong, Adolin thought. Except my father said he’d rather be wrong, if it would be better for Alethkar. Adolin doubted many lighteyes would rather be proven mad than right.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“Szeth could feel the Light’s warmth, its fury, like a tempest that had been injected directly into his veins. The power of it was invigorating but dangerous. It pushed him to act. To move. To strike.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“And yet, scholars said it must be a plant for the way it grew and reached toward the light. Men did that too, he thought. Once.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“The desire to make art begins early. Among the very young this is encouraged (or at least indulged as harmless) but the push toward a 'serious' education soon exacts a heavy toll on dreams and fantasies....Yet for some the desire persists, and sooner or later must be addressed. And with good reason: your desire to make art -- beautiful or meaningful or emotive art -- is integral to your sense of who you are. Life and Art, once entwined, can quickly become inseparable; at age ninety Frank Lloyd Wright was still designing, Imogen Cunningham still photographing, Stravinsky still composing, Picasso still painting.

But if making art gives substance to your sense of self, the corresponding fear is that you're not up to the task -- that you can't do it, or can't do it well, or can't do it again; or that you're not a real artist, or not a good artist, or have no talent, or have nothing to say. The line between the artist and his/her work is a fine one at best, and for the artist it feels (quite naturally) like there is no such line. Making art can feel dangerous and revealing. Making art is dangerous and revealing. Making art precipitates self-doubt, stirring deep waters that lay between what you know you should be, and what you fear you might be. For many people, that alone is enough to prevent their ever getting started at all -- and for those who do, trouble isn't long in coming. Doubts, in fact, soon rise in swarms:

"I am not an artist -- I am a phony. I have nothing worth saying. I'm not sure what I'm doing. Other people are better than I am. I'm only a [student/physicist/mother/whatever]. I've never had a real exhibit. No one understands my work. No one likes my work. I'm no good.

Yet viewed objectively, these fears obviously have less to do with art than they do with the artist. And even less to do with the individual artworks. After all, in making art you bring your highest skills to bear upon the materials and ideas you most care about. Art is a high calling -- fears are coincidental. Coincidental, sneaky and disruptive, we might add, disguising themselves variously as laziness, resistance to deadlines, irritation with materials or surroundings, distraction over the achievements of others -- indeed anything that keeps you from giving your work your best shot. What separates artists from ex-artists is that those who challenge their fears, continue; those who don't, quit. Each step in the artmaking process puts that issue to the test.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“to require perfection is to invite paralysis. The pattern is predictable: as you see error in what you have done, you steer your work toward what you imagine you can do perfectly. You cling ever more tightly to what you already know you can do — away from risk and exploration, and possibly further from the work of your heart. You find reasons to procrastinate, since to not work is to not make mistakes. Believing that artwork should be perfect, you gradually become convinced that you cannot make such work. (You are correct.) Sooner or later, since you cannot do what you are trying to do, you quit. And in one of those perverse little ironies of life, only the pattern itself achieves perfection — a perfect death spiral: you misdirect your work; you stall; you quit.”
― David Bayles, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

“In large measure becoming an artist consists of learning to accept yourself, which makes your work personal, and in following your own voice, which makes your work distinctive.”
― David Bayles, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

“Making art now means working in the face of uncertainty ; it means living with doubt and contradiction, doing something no one much cares whether you do, and for which there may be neither audience nor reward. Making the work you want to make means setting aside these doubts so that you may see clearly what you have done, and thereby see where to go next. Making the work you want to make means finding nourishment within the work itself.”
― David Bayles, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

“The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars. One of the basic and difficult lessons every artist must learn is that even the failed pieces are essential. X-rays of famous paintings reveal that even master artists sometimes made basic mid-course corrections (or deleted really dumb mistakes) by overpainting the still-wet canvas. The point is that you learn how to make your work by making your work, and a great many of the pieces you make along the way will never stand out as finished art. The best you can do is make art you care about — and lots of it!”
― David Bayles, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

“Making art can feel dangerous and revealing. Making art is dangerous and revealing. Making art precipitates self-doubt, stirring deep waters that lay between what you know you should be, and what you fear you might be.”
― David Bayles, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

“Your imagination is free to race a hundred works ahead, conceiving pieces you could and perhaps should and maybe one day will execute - but not today, not in the piece at hand. All you can work on today is directly in front of you. Your job is to develop an imagination of the possible.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgement difficult. — Hippocrates (460-400 B.C.)”
― David Bayles, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

“Control, apparently, is not the answer. People who need certainty in their lives are less likely to make art that is risky, subversive, complicated, iffy, suggestive or spontaneous. What's really needed is nothing more than a broad sense of what you are looking for, some strategy for how to find it, and an overriding willingess to embrace mistakes and surprises along the way.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“Making the work you want to make means finding nourishment within the work itself.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“Making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do, and what you did. In fact, if artmaking did not tell you (the maker) so enormously about yourself, then making art that matters to you would be impossible. To all viewers but yourself, what matter is the product: the experience of shaping that artwork. The viewers' concerns are not your concerns (although it's dangerously easy to adopt their attitudes.) Their job is whatever it is: to be moved by art, to be entertained by it, to make a killing off it, whatever. Your job is to learn to work on your work.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“Making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do, and what you did. In fact, if artmaking did not tell you (the maker) so enormously about yourself, then making art that matters to you would be impossible. To all viewers but yourself, what matter is the product: the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experience of shaping that artwork. The viewers' concerns are not your concerns (although it's dangerously easy to adopt their attitudes.) Their job is whatever it is: to be moved by art, to be entertained by it, to make a killing off it, whatever. Your job is to learn to work on your work.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“In fact there's generally no good reason why others *should* care about most of any one artist's work. The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars. One of the basic and difficult lessons every artist must learn is that even the failed pieces are essential...The point is that you learn how to make your work *by making your work,* and a great many of the pieces you make along the way will never stand out *as finished art.*”
― David Bayles

“Even the separation of art from craft is largely a post-Renaissance concept, and more recent still is the notion that art transcends what you do, and represents what you are. In the past few centuries Western art has moved from unsigned tableaus of orthodox religious scenes to one-person displays of personal cosmologies. “Artist” has gradually become a form of identity which (as every artist knows) often carries with it as many drawbacks as benefits. Consider that if artist equals self, then when (inevitably) you make flawed art, you are a flawed person, and when (worse yet) you make no art, you are no person at all! It seems far healthier to sidestep that vicious spiral by accepting many paths to successful artmaking — from reclusive to flamboyant, intuitive to intellectual, folk art to fine art. One of those paths is yours.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“Lesson for the day: vision is always ahead of execution — and it should be. Vision, Uncertainty, and Knowledge of Materials are inevitabilities that all artists must acknowledge and learn from: vision is always ahead of execution, knowledge of materials is your contact with reality, and uncertainty is a virtue.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear