Paul Shepheard Quotes

Everything is emotional because hope is… When I talk to people I no longer see rational beings engaged in rational discourse, I see objects, emoting. It has made me such a deep materialist that I see everything as objects, people, dogs, trees, rocks- objects that burn with the animation of hope, each engaged in their own private miracle of being. And the things that people make, the buildings and machines, the paintings and the poems, are artificial miracles, which glow from the light borrowed from their makers.

The wilderness is not a landscape you visit; it is all around you, wherever you are. We persuade ourselves that our taming of the world is profound, we lay water mains and sewers and read thousand year old books, we drive our autobahns through solid rock, we huddle together in caves lit by the incandescence of television screens. We do everything we can to be safe, and still the planet spins, the winds roar, the great ice caps creak and heave, the continental plates shudder and bring cities crashing to the ground, the viruses infect us and the oceans toy with us, lapping against the edges of our precarious land. We are in the midst of wilderness, even curled up with our lovers in bed.

Getting older is a question of coming to terms with the fact that you'll never know the secrets; and the resulting equilibrium is what gives the illusion of actually knowing them.

And is it not the artists that make art? Well, no: criticism is now the substance of art making to such a degree that many of today's public artists do away with the product as an issue, and make public debate the contents of their art. In doing so they are not redefining art so much as redefining public space. The debate itself has become the public space.

Writers use narratives to select from everything there is, and make contexts by putting the pieces into relation; that's what writers do, they make contexts.