“The genuine artist, Harris is saying, finds reality in a point of identity between subject and object, a point at which the created world and the world that is really there become the same thing. [p.211]”
“An artist is a provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one. It’s this in-between that I’m calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one. That is the realm of the artist.”
“Violence is central in our lives, a constant and unavoidable reality. Experience is not a linear construct moving from one point to another - childhood to maturity, "bad" to "good," beginning to end - but a wheel turning around a point that shifts between hope and despair. "At the still point of the turning world," the job of the artist is not to resolve or beautify, but to hold complexities, to see and make clear.”
“However, the natural symbol, without our being sufficiently conscious of the fact, is identical with the reality of the world that appears to us, for every object in the natural world is at the same time a symbolic reality to us. The psyche certainly does not use an "object" of nature as a "symbol," but rather the experience of an "object" itself is always already symbolic experience. The star or tree in us is no less real and no less symbolic than it is in outward experience. For each possibility of experience either presupposes a spiritually forming, that is to say a symbolic activity, or is identical with this. That is, everything spiritual appears to us first not just in nature but as nature; or we could formulate this just as well the other way around: everything natural, whether outward or inward, appears to us as an image, that is to say as formed spirit. We are surrounded by images, inwardly and outwardly, but at the same time formed and determined in all our experiences by the natural symbol as though by a unitary natural-spiritual reality, for our psychic system only grasps that which appears to us as the real world through the world of natural symbolism.”
“Nothing is really lost or can be lost, No birth, identity, form, no object of the world, Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing..”
“Maybe I'm not as intimidated by the world, by people. The worst thing that people can really do is say 'no' to you. And 'no' isn't that bad because eventually it helps point you in the right direction, I think. Helps you find 'yes.”