“What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to a human soul.”

“The story is told of Michelangelo being asked about his methods for sculpting.He replied simply that he worked on a block of marble, removing all that was notpart of the sculpture until only the sculpture remained. I suspect this oversimplifiesthe art of sculpture, but it’s an excellent analogy for photography, which isessentially an art of exclusion.”

“Without art; without paintings, books, sculpture and music, the human soul would be quite impenetrable, don’t you think?”

“We are each given a block of marble when we begin a lifetime, and the tools to shape it into sculpture. We can drag it behind us untouched, we can pound it to gravel, we can shape it into glory. Examples from every other life are left for us to see, lifeworks finished and unfinished, guiding and warning. Near the end our sculpture is nearly finished, and we can smooth and polish what we started years before. We can make our progress then, but to do it we must see past the appearances of age.”

“I'd left behind a thousand tons of marble, I could have released sculptures, I could have released myself from the marble of myself. I'd experienced joy, but not nearly enough, could there be enough?”

“Writing is like sculpturing words out of a block of imagination. Sentences chisel the story, then characters make it their own.”