Weekend Words: Rocks

Sarah Sze is representing the USA at the Venice Biennale, which opened this week. Part of her project is the production of meticulously crafted artificial rocks, which she has placed around the city.

One of them landed on the roof of the newsstand run by Jacobo Chiozzoto, who told the New York Times: “When people ask what it is, I give different answers depending on who wants to know,” he said with a laugh. “Sometimes I say it’s to hold down the roof; other times I tell people it’s an asteroid.”

“Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.”

—Sigmund Freud

“Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck.”

—John Dryden, from “Absalom and Achitophel”

“There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.”

—Ernest Hemingway

“No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.”

—William Wordsworth, from “A Slumber Did My Spirit Steal”

“When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it – a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand – as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there’s a clash between the two, it’s bad art.”

—Marc Chagall

“She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave.”

—Walter Pater, from Studies in the History of the Renaissance, on Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa”

• Opinion
• Weekend
• Weekend Words