Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My work is not about my life history. It's not about the story of my neurosis.
It's possible to be satisfied with a day's work or a cake, but a life... what is a life but a history of events badly remembered?
While we are living in the present, we must celebrate life every day, knowing that we are becoming history with every work, every action, every deed.
Life doesn't just happen; it's constructed through the history of power. And that's something I am interested in and so is the art world: a world that's trying to engage socially, with a leftist slant, to work out how we got here.
I came in the gate as an African-American poor kid wanting to be a neurosurgeon but - with American life and the places I was put due to American history and laws and the oppression of black people - I had to make it work in other ways.
What was very interesting to me about Clementine Hunter's work is that she couldn't read or write, and she has recorded history of the plantation life and the southern part of the U.S. - the cotton harvests, pecan picking, washing clothes, funerals, marriages - in pictures.
In the post-Soviet era, the most interesting work on the Stalinist period has been social history, far beyond the Kremlin walls - the study of what one of its leading practitioners, Sheila Fitzpatrick, in her book 'Everyday Stalinism,' called 'ordinary life in extraordinary times.'
I know that many of you do wear such a cross of Christ, not in any ostentatious way, not in a way that might harm you at your work or recreation, but a simple indication that you value the role of Jesus Christ in the history of the world, that you are trying to live by Christ's standards in your own daily life.
As we have seen in our own history, the injection of new ideas from other worlds transformed life for all, and with the establishment of new frontier communities far from the reach of the old world, new social systems also formed, more in tune with the fact that it was the individual who had to make the decisions and do the work of pioneering.