“In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror and the reflected figures like motion pictures superimposed one on the other. The figures and the background were unrelated, and yet the figures, transparent and intangible, and the background, dim in the gathering darkness, melted into a sort of symbolic world not of this world. Particularly when a light out in the mountains shone in the center of the girl's face, Shimamura felt his chest rise at the inexpressible beauty of it.”

Snow Country (1948)

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Yasunari Kawabata44

Japanese author, Nobel Prize winner 1899–1972

Iris Murdoch book A Severed Head

Source: A Severed Head

“a figure should be a part of the background against which it is placed”

Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) French painter and printmaker

“Nothing is going to change in the Congo until you and I figure out what is wrong with the person in the mirror.”

Donald Miller book Blue Like Jazz: nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

“Figures were never for me a compact mass but like a transparent construction.”

Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Swiss sculptor and painter (1901-1966)

Alberto Giacometti. Exhibition of sculptures, paintings, drawings. Pierre Matisse Gallery (New York, N.Y.), 1948. p. 36

“It was not that the figure had been removed, not that the figures had been swept away, but the symbols for the figures, and in turn the shapes in the later canvases were substitutes for the figures.... these new shapes say.... what the symbols said.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

Rothko, explaining Seitz his new way of painting during the mid-1940s
Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 142
after 1970, posthumous

“In his soul, as in a mirror, were concentrated all the lights radiating from every point of observation — whether human or Divine — and from his soul as from a mirror, these lights were reflected back in every possible combination of beauty and sublimity.”

James Francis Stephens (1792–1852) British ornithologist and entomologist

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 115.

“It was not that the figure had been removed, not that the figures had been swept away, but the symbols for the figures, and in turn the shapes in the later canvases were substitutes for the figures…. these new shapes say…. what the symbols said. [Rothko, explaining Seitz his new way of painting during the mid-1940s]”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 142
after 1970, posthumous

“[the 'Surfboards' - series works Noland made mid-70's] were almost like cut-out figures without being figurative… I think of them, in some way, as being like figures; they remind me of figures in vertical Cubist paintings. Even the small pictures have that kind of human proportion in the rectangles. It's not exactly a reference, but the relation of length to width in the rectangles is like a person.”

Kenneth Noland (1924–2010) American artist

Kenneth Noland, pp. 23-24
Conversation with Karen Wilkin' (1986-1988)

“It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery.”

Carl Sagan book Pale Blue Dot

Source: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994), p. 159
Context: It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.

“Rachel was looking into the mirror at an angle of 45°, and so had a view of the face turned toward the room and the face on the other side, reflected in the mirror; here were time and reverse-time, co-existing, cancelling one another exactly out. Were there many such reference points, scattered throughout the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied; did real time plus virtual or mirror-time equal zero and thus serve some half-understood moral purpose? Or was it only the mirror world that counted; only a promise of a kind that the inward bow of a nose-bridge or a promontory of extra cartilage at the chin meant a reversal of ill fortune such that the world of the altered would thenceforth run on mirror-time; work and love by mirror-light and be only, till death stopped the heart's ticking (metronome's music) quietly as light ceases to vibrate, an imp's dance under the century's own chandeliers….”

Thomas Pynchon book V.

Source: V. (1963), Chapter Two, Part I

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Yasunari Kawabata44

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