“Talent consists not in inventing shapes but in causing those that were invisible to emerge.”

“I'd seen the older children in class look into books for invisible traces, as if they were driven by the same force and, sinking deeper into silence, they were able to draw from the dead paper something that seemed alive.”

“What does Art do for us? It gives shape to our emotions, makes them visible, and, in so doing, places a seal of eternity upon them, a seal representing all those works that, by means of a particular form, have incarnated the universal nature of human emotions.”

“Beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It’s the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you see both their beauty and their death....Does this mean that this is how we must live our lives? Constantly poised between beauty and death, between movement and its disappearance?Maybe that’s what being alive is all about: so we can track down those moments that are dying.”

“Un bravo marmista conosce la materia...il suo talento, infatti, non consiste nell'inventare forme, bensi' nel rendere manifeste quelle che erano invisibili.”

“We have a knowledge of harmony, anchored deep within. It is this knowledge that enables us, at every instant, to apprehend quality in our lives and, on the rare occasions when everything is in perfect harmony, to appreciate it with the apposite intensity. And I am not referring to the sort of beauty that is the exclusive preserve of Art. Those who feel inspired, as I do, by the greatness of small things will pursue them to the very heart of the inessential where, cloaked in everyday attire, this greatness will emerge from within a certain ordering of ordinary things and from the certainty that all is as it should be, the conviction that it is fine this way.”

“As always, I am saved by the inability of living creatures to believe anything that might cause the walls of their little mental assumptions to crumble.”