James Fenton Quotes

I write everything in Courier 12 because I write for publication, not pleasure.

It was Chicago with its World's Fair which vivified the national desire for civic beauty.

I'm pretty much all for poetry in public places - poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes.

I love design.

Anything written or printed under a print or picture takes the attention from it and, if it is very black or white in any marked degree, will utterly destroy its beauty.

I have the same sense of discovery and exhilaration from objects of design and everyday use - I am inspired by the buildings in my city, by park greenery and dazzling store windows, by the jaunty strollers and umbrellas and billboards I walk past. Just strolling our streets, we encounter creativity every single day.

A good typeface is like a well-crafted English or Italian suit: it always looks perfect.

By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately and well.

You shall see them on a beautiful quarto page where a neat rivulet of text shall meander through a meadow of margin.

I might not use capital letters. But I would definitely use an apostrophe…and probably a period. I’m a huge fan of punctuation.

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night Become the touches of sweet harmony. Sit, Jessica: look, how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold; There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins. Such harmony is in immortal souls; But whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

I thought of you and how you love this beauty, And walking up the long beach all alone I heard the waves breaking in measured thunder As you and I once heard their monotone. Around me were the echoing dunes, beyond me The cold and sparkling silver of the sea -- We two will pass through death and ages lengthen Before you hear that sound again with me.

Sculptors, poets, painters, musicians-they're the traditional purveyors of Beauty. But it can as easily be created by a gardener, a farmer, a plumber, a careworker.

The beautiful are never desolate; But some one alway loves them--God or man. If man abandons, God himself takes them.

I commend women who wake up 30, 40 minutes early to put on eyeliner. I think it's ­beautiful. I'm just not that person.

The beauty of a cuckoo is in its notes, that of a woman in her unalloyed devotion to her husband, that of an ugly person in his scholarship, and that of an ascetic in his forgiveness.

Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side.

I attain a different kind of beauty, achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords, showing all the traces of the mind's passage through the world, achieve in the end some kind of whole made of shivering fragments.

Life is earnest, art is gay.

The graceful ivy, clasping the oak that supported it, would form a whole in which strength and beauty would be equally conspicuous.

The beauty seen is partly in him who sees it.

It is no accident that on the whole there was more beauty and decency to be found in the life of the small peoples, and that among the large ones there was more happiness and content in proportion as they had avoided the deadly blight of centralization.

Music is a bird's answer to the noise and heaviness of words. It puts the mind in a state of exhilarated speechlessness.

I believe flowers have souls. I have known roses that I expect to meet in heaven.

Hey, look at this!" He holds up a glistening, perfect pearl about the size of a pea. "You know, if you put enough pressure on coal it turns to pearls," he says earnestly to Finnick. "No, it doesn't," says Finnick dismissively. But I crack up, remembering that's how a clueless Effie Trinket presented us to the people of the Capitol last year, before anyone knew us. As coal pressured into pearls by our weighty existence. Beauty that arose out of pain.