His disposition on any particular day was as much a factor in what she could and couldn’t do as the weather was, and she had learned to read his face the way real country people read the sunrise and sunset.
Flannery O’Connor, “Greenleaf,” 1956
They now came to learn that even shadows can waste away, losing the faint hues of life that memory may give.
Albert Camus, The Plague, 1947
Most of us have a lot of unlearn.
Daniel Birnbaum in Anthony Huberman, “I (Not Love) Information,” 2007
Learning how to appreciate things we don't understand – and how to value the state of curiosity in which that places us – has significant political implications as well as the potential to strengthen our ability to co-exist with difference and remain open to the adjustments that difference asks of us.
Anthony Huberman, “I (Not Love) Information,” 2007
Formalism asserts that the text stands on its own as a complete entity, apart from the writer who produced it. ... One can regard textual products as teachable and still maintain that being a writer is a 'natural' act, one not subject to instruction. Composition, like creative writing, has flourished under the assumption that students are already writers, or have the capacity to learn-and that everyone should be writers. Yet the questions composition tends to pose within this assumption are not so much about which aspects of writing can or cannot be taught, but how writing can be taught and under what conditions. In regards to formalist composition, one must ask: to what extent is this ‘need’ for ‘academic discourse’ real – any more than the need for more ‘imaginative writing’ is real-except to perform some function, to get something done?
Mary Ann Cain, "Problematizing Formalism: A Double-Cross of Genre Boundaries", 1999
nickkahler reblogged
To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 1963 (via lost)
I'm a great history lover. I never learned history, I never had a course in history. I just picked it up. Through the pores of your skin is where you learn.
Philip Johnson, “American Architecture Now,” c. 1983
Demolition is often an attempt to sweep things under the carpet, and that doesn't seem like the right way to learn from the past.
Ada Tolla, “On Vele Di Scampia, Naples, Italy,” 2015 (via nytimes)
If artists today work for the living, they must live with the dead. Because only they can teach them.
Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, "On Art," c. 1859 (via bressani)