“Variety's the very spice of life,
That gives it all its flavour.”
Source: The Task (1785), Book II, The Timepiece, Line 606.
“I think that art is the commemoration of life in its variety.”
Joyce Carol Oates interviews herself (2013)
Context: I think that art is the commemoration of life in its variety. The novel, for instance, is “historic” in its embodiment in a specific place and time and its suggestion that there is meaning to our actions. Without the stillness, thoughtfulness and depths of art, and without the ceaseless moral rigors of art, we would have no shared culture — no collective memory. As it is, in contemporary societies, where so much concentration is focused on social media, insatiable in its myriad, fleeting interests, the “stillness and thoughtfulness” of a more permanent art feels threatened.
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Joyce Carol Oates89
American author 1938Related quotes
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