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.
At the ballet classes I took when I first came to New York, I would see great dancers like Cynthia Gregory and Lupe Serrano. I would look at them and study what they could do, and what I couldn't do. And then I'd think maybe they should try what I could do.
There are writers in Germany who drink the Absolute like water; and there are books in which even the dogs make references to the Infinite.
To understand bad taste one must have very good taste.
It's taken me other places, but it was the impulse to write that led me to singing. I'm not a musician. I never thought of performing in a rock n' roll band. I was just drawn in. It was like being called to duty - I was called to duty, and I did my duty as best as I could.
Let proportion be found not only in numbers and measures, but also in sounds, weights, times, and positions, and what ever force there is.
One wants one's work to be the world, but of course it's never the world. The work is in the world; it never contains the whole thing.
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