Weekend Words: Sight
John Bramblitt of Denton, Texas, lost his sight 13 years ago but paints vivid portraits and landscapes by "feeling" the textures of different colors.
John Bramblitt of Denton, Texas, lost his sight 13 years ago but paints vivid portraits and landscapes by “feeling” the textures of different colors. (Read the full story in The Independent.)
Aye on the shores of darkness there is light,
And precipices show untrodden green,
There is a budding morrow in midnight,
There is a triple sight in blindness keen.
—John Keats “To Homer”
Does it matter?—losing your sight?…
There’s such splendid work for the blind;
And people will always be kind,
As you sit on the terrace remembering
And turning your face to the light.
—Siegfried Sassoon, “Does It Matter”
Writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight.
—Edna Ferber
Behold! her bosom and half her side–
A sight to dream of, not to tell!
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Christabel”
A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search of truth or perfection is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life.
—Lewis Mumford
All my life through, the new sights of Nature made me rejoice like a child.
—Marie Curie
Then, through the blood and weeping, stretches
My dying sight to space remote;
I see upon the river’s reaches
Christ sailing to me upon a boat.
—Alexander Blok, “Autumn Love”
The advantage of love at first sight is that it delays a second sight.
—Natalie Barney
We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in print.
—Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader
Nothing focuses the mind better than the constant sight of a competitor who wants to wipe you off the map.
—Wayne Calloway
Nothing sharpens sight like envy.
—Thomas Fuller
There is nothing like the sight of an old enemy down on his luck.
—Euripides
To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers, may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers, but extremely fit for a nation that is governed by shopkeepers.
—Adam Smith
You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension — a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You’ve just crossed over into the Twilight Zone.
—Rod Serling
Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! A bas l’originalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le vol-pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.”
―William S. Burroughs, The Adding Machine
