In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.
Interpretation
Art has the power to redeem and transform through its expression.
Raymond Chandler suggests that all forms of art possess an inherent quality of redemption, implying that artistic expression can provide healing, renewal, and a sense of salvation both for the creator and the audience. This perspective highlights art's ability to transcend mere aesthetics, serving as a catalyst for personal and communal growth and transformation.
In practice
During an art exhibition, one might use this quote to discuss the transformative power of the works displayed.
Undoubtedly the stories about them [hard-boiled detectives] had a fantastic element. Such things happened, but not so rapidly, nor to so close-knit a group of people, nor within so narrow a frame of logic. This was inevitable because the demand was for constant action; if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.
Organized crime is the dirty side of the sharp dollar.
When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring.
If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.
Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?
Some of the smallest things on a smaller film, to me, are greater achievements than on a big film when you have the resources and the time and everything else.
It is my belief that many who think they dislike poetry are really poetical in their natures and are indebted to it, more than they imagine, for the success they may have achieved, even in practical pursuits, and for the enjoyment their lives have afforded them.
Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.
Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.
There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law. I love music passionately. And because l love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it. It is a free art gushing forth, an open-air art boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea. It must never be shut in and become an academic art.
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