Weekend Words: Space
"While the people retain their virtue, and vigilance, no administration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly, can very seriously injure the government, in the short space of four years."
Artists Space, the nonprofit gallery founded in Soho in 1972, is departing its Greene Street location in June because its landlord plans to erect a penthouse atop the building.
While the people retain their virtue, and vigilance, no administration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly, can very seriously injure the government, in the short space of four years.
—Abraham Lincoln
The most violent revolutions in an individual’s beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one’s own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.
—William James
Architecture is the art of how to waste space.
—Philip Johnson
Space is the place.
—Sun Ra
Music is the space between the notes.
—Claude Debussy
Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.
—Marshall McLuhan
Outer space is no place for a person of breeding.
—Violet Bonham Carter
O God! I could be bounded in a nut-shell, and myself king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Stars scribble on our eyes the frosty sagas,
The gleaming cantos of unvanquished space.
—Hart Crane, “Cape Hatteras”
The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth… the pollution of American space, with gadgetry and cars and TV and box architecture, brutalizes the senses, making gray neurotics of most of us, and perverse spiritual athletes and strident self-transcenders of the best of us.
—Susan Sontag
In the United States there is more space where nobody is
than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is.
—Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America
There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself—
Finite infinity.
—Emily Dickinson, XXV
