And for the last three minutes on the wind of a windless day I have heard the sound of drums and flute.
Interpretation
This quote evokes a sense of beauty found in silence and the imagination's power to conjure sounds.
Tom Stoppard's quote illustrates the profound impact of imagination and art on our perception of reality. In the absence of actual sound, the speaker reflects on how the mind can still hear music, suggesting that creativity allows us to experience beauty even in stillness. It highlights the notion that art can extend beyond the physical world, triggering emotions and sensations that are deeply felt yet invisible.
In practice
This quote could be used in a presentation about the importance of creativity in art.
Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.
A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's not there.
I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.
One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time.
A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.
Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text.
Aestheticism is a search after the signs of the beautiful. It is the science of the beautiful through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life.
I'd like to think I've left something in the world. Without in any way trying to be morbid, but life is very short, and I'd like to think I'd leave some body of work that would inspire other musicians long after I've gone.
When I'm dead, I want to be remembered as a musician of some worth and substance.
You hear it said time and time again by successful directors: You have to make a movie for yourself. Don't make it for anyone else.
Because beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their beauty and their death.
Plays, especially great plays, yield their secrets over a long period of time. You can't read it three times and say, 'OK, I got it. I know what's happening.'
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