Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, Ed Ruscha, 1968. 53.5 x 133.5 in.

“In the Hirschhorn, she sped along with the same gallop as at the National Gallery, racing by masterpieces with her head swiveling. One picture, however, stuck her feet in cement. Painted in 1967, Ed Ruscha’s large canvas depicted the Los Angeles County Museum on fire. Devoid of people on the grounds, the museum was shown in cool tones and sharp outline, while flames blew out from behind the building. The picture was so unlike the slash-and-burn canvases of the abstract pictures she had just seen. Those pictures asked for an emotional response. This one asked for an intellectual response. Was this a tragic image or a surreal one? The horror going on inside was unrevealed and only imagined. And where were the people? Then, as she waited in front of the picture for a thought to congeal, Lacey’s mental gears cranked down, the questions stopped, and for a moment, her brain stopped churning and she just stared at it.”

— Steve Martin | AN OBJECT OF BEAUTY

“One artist with the pseudonym (it was natural to assume) of Pilot Mouse had taken over a gallery and installed . . . another gallery. We viewers went in one at a time, and inside was a simulation of an uptown gallery, complete with gallery goers—really guerrilla actors—who walked around and looked at the antique store paintings on the wall.”

— Steve Martin | AN OBJECT OF BEAUTY

“A large part of her simplicity consisted in determining not to want what she could not have with ease.”

— James Baldwin | GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN

“Vanity...is definitely my favorite sin.”

— THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE

“We are most of us like Don Quixote, to whom a windmill was a giant, and Dulcinea a magnificent princess: all more or less the dupes of our own imagination, though we do not all go so far as to see ghosts, or to fancy ourselves pipkins and teapots.”

— Thomas Love Peacock | NIGHTMARE ABBEY

“Look in the mirror
Familiar figure
Staring right back at me
Split decision
Now my reflection’s talking
But I didn’t speak
He said, oh my god, you’re piecing it together
You are just a shadow of me
Oh my lord, you’ve never left the mirror
You were never ever free
But tonight, you will play that tambourine, yeah
You will be that chosen master
You will leave with the girl this time
You will be the leading actor
Movie of your own design
And when you hit disaster
The answer will be yours to find
You’re the mirror’s master
Now forever, I’m resigned
Take in the vision
My imperfections
Shatter in the mirror of me
Another shadow
Slips into the chateau
Hoping that I cannot see
I said, oh my god, I’m piecing it together
You were just a memory
Oh my lord, you’ve never left the mirror
You were never ever free
But tonight you will play that tambourine, yeah
You will be that chosen master
You will leave with the girl this time
You will be the leading actor
Movie of your own design
And when you hit disaster
The answer will be yours to find
You’re the mirror’s master
Now forever I’m, resigned”

— Young the Giant | MIRROR MASTER

“And as for fortune and as for fame
I never invited them in
Though it seemed to the world they were all I desired
They are illusions
They’re not the solutions they promised to be
The answer was here all the time
I love you and hope you love me
Don’t cry for me Argentina”

— Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice | EVITA

“Keen as her interest in the rugged relics of the Roman past that lay scattered about her and in which the corrosion of centuries had still left so much of individual life, her thoughts, after resting a while on these things, had wandered, by a concatenation of stages it might require some subtlety to trace, to regions and objects charged with a more active appeal. From the Roman past to Isabel Archer’s future was a long stride, but her imagination had taken it in a single flight and now hovered in slow circles over the nearer and richer field.”

— Henry James | THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

“I came from the people, they need to adore me
So Christian Dior me from my head to my toes
I need to be dazzling, I want to be rainbow high
They must have excitement, and so must I

Eyes, hair, mouth, figure
Dress, voice, style, image

I’m their product, it’s vital you sell me
So machiavell me, make an Argentine rose
I need to be thrilling, I want to be rainbow high
They need their escape, and so do I

Eyes, hair, mouth, figure
Dress, voice, style, movement
Hands, magic, rings, glamour
Face, diamonds, excitement, image

All my descamisados expect me to outshine the enemy
I won’t disappoint them
I’m their savior, that’s what they call me
So Lauren Bacall me, anything goes
To make me fantastic, I have to be rainbow high
In magical colors

You’re not decorating a girl for a night on the town
And I’m not a second-rate queen getting kicks with a crown”

— Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice | EVITA

“Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”

— Virginia Woolf | A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN

“‘Well, you’re not in love with her, I hope.’
’How can that be, when I’m in love with Another?’
’You’re in love with yourself, that’s the Other!’”

— Henry James | THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

“Some boys hate themselves
Spend their lives resenting their fathers
Some girls hate their bodies
Stand in the mirror and wait for the feedback

Saying God, make me famous
If you can’t just make it painless
Just make it painless

Assisted suicide
She dreams about dying all the time
She told me she came so close
Filled up the bathtub and put on our first record

Saying God, make me famous
If you can’t just make it painless
Just make it painless

It goes on and on, I don’t know what I want
On and on, I don’t know if I want it
On and on, I don’t know what I want
On and on, I don’t know if I want it
(On and on I don’t know what I want)
(On and on I don’t know if I want it)
(On and on I don’t know what I want)
(On and on I don’t know if I want it)”

— Arcade Fire | CREATURE COMFORT

“I think you must at least assent to the following positions: that the many are sacrificed to the few; that ninety-nine in a hundred are occupied in a perpetual struggle for the preservation of a perilous and precarious existence, while the remaining one wallows in all the redundancies of luxury that can be wrung from their labours and privations; that luxury and liberty are incompatible; and that every new want you invent for civilised man is a new instrument of torture for him who cannot indulge it.”

— Thomas Love Peacock | HEADLONG HALL

“There’s that great passage in Proust where Marcel talks about imagining the face of the girl you’ve only glimpsed from behind. How beautiful the unseen face always is. I have yet to experience the disappointing reality of César.”

— Jonathan Franzen | PURITY

“Art is an old language with a great many artificial affected styles, and sometimes the chief pleasure one gets out of knowing them is the mere sense of knowing.”

— George Eliot | MIDDLEMARCH

“All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.”

— Sun Tsu | THE ART OF WAR

“Since the dawn of military aviation, birds of prey had been thought of as warplanes made flesh: beings of aerodynamic, predatory perfection. Hawks fly and hunt and kill: aircraft do the same. These similarities were seized upon by military propagandists, for they made air warfare, like hawks, part of the natural order of things. Falconry’s medieval glamour played its part, too, and soon hawks and aeroplanes were deeply entangled in visions of war and national defence. There’s an extraordinary example of this in Powell and Pressburger’s 1944 film A Canterbury Tale. In the opening scenes a party of Chaucerian pilgrims cross the downs on the way to Canterbury. A knight unhoods a falcon and casts it into the air. The camera lingers on its flickering wings—a quick cut—and the falcon’s silhouette becomes a diving Spitfire. We see the knight’s face again. It is the same face, but now it wears the helmet of a modern soldier as it watches the Spitfire above. The sequence is powered by the myth of an essential Britishness unchanged through the ages, and it shows how powerfully hawks could marry romantic medievalism with the hard-edged technology of modern war. ”

— Helen Macdonald | H IS FOR HAWK

“In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.

It results from this that perfection of invention touches hands with the absence of invention, as if that line which the human eye will follow with effortless delight were a line that had not been invented but simply discovered, had in the beginning been hidden by nature and in the end been found by the engineer. There is an ancient myth out the image asleep in the block of marble until it is carefully disengaged by the sculptor. The sculptor must himself feel that he is not so much inventing or shaping the curve of breast or shoulder as delivering the image from its prison.

In this spirit do engineers, physicists concerned with thermodynamics, and the swarm of preoccupied draughtsmen tackle their work. In appearance, but only in appearance, they seem to be polishing surfaces and refining away angles, easing this joint or stabilizing that wing, rendering these parts invisible, so that in the end there is no longer a wing hooked to a framework but a form flawless in its perfection, completely disengaged from its matrix, a sort of spontaneous whole, its parts mysteriously fused together and resembling in their unity a poem.

Meanwhile, startling as it is that all visible evidence of invention should have been refined out of this instrument and that there should be delivered to us an object as natural as a pebble polished by the waves, it is equally wonderful that he who uses this instrument should be able to forget that it is a machine.

There was a time when a flyer sat at the centre of a complicated works. Flight set us factory problems. The indicators that oscillated on the instrument panel warned us of a thousand dangers. But in the machine of today we forget that the motors are whirring: the motor, finally, has come to fulfil its function, which is to whirr as a heart beats—and we give no thought to the beating of our heart. Thus precisely because it is perfect the machine dissembles its own existence instead of forcing itself upon us.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupery | WIND, SAND, AND STARS

“His students—if they were any mark of his tutelage—were imposing enough, and different as they all were they shared a certain coolness, a cruel, mannered charm which was not modern in the least but had a strange cold breath of the ancient world:they were magnificent creatures, such eyes, such hands, such looks—sic oculos, sic ille manus, sic ora ferehat. I envied them, and found them attractive; moreover this strange quality, far from being natural, gave every indication of having been intensely cultivated. (It was the same, I would come to find, with Julian: though he gave quite the opposite impression, of freshness and candor, it was not spontaneity but superior art which made it seem unstudied.) Studied or not, I wanted to be like them. It was heady to think that these qualities were acquired ones and that, perhaps, this was the way I might learn them.”

— Donna Tartt | THE SECRET HISTORY

“We have advanced from canoes to galleys to steamships to space shuttles—but nobody knows where we’re going. We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power. Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one. We are consequently wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and on the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction.

Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?”

— Yuval Noah Harai | SAPIENS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND