To me, part of the beauty of a comma is that it offers a rest, like one in music: a break that gives the whole piece of music greater shape, deeper harmony. It allows us to catch our breath.
Interpretation
The beauty of a comma lies in its ability to create pauses that enhance the overall structure and harmony of writing, much like music.
In this quote, Pico Iyer likens a comma to a musical rest, suggesting that it serves to create necessary pauses in writing. These pauses not only give readers a moment to reflect but also contribute to the overall flow and depth of the text, much like how rests in music shape the melody and allow for a richer auditory experience.
In practice
A writer might use this quote during a workshop on punctuation to emphasize the importance of rhythm in writing.
Quitting, for me, means not giving up, but moving on; changing direction not because something doesn’t agree with you, but because you don’t agree with something. It’s not a complaint, in other words, but a positive choice, and not a stop in one’s journey, but a step in a better direction. Quitting-whether a job or a habit-means taking a turn so as to be sure you’re still moving in the direction of your dreams.
I think one reason, obviously, that I spend so much time in one place is that I've been lucky enough to travel a lot, and now there are other different, invisible trains that are more interesting to me.
I've never meditated in my life. I don't practice yoga nor any religion. I'm a tourist on the realm of stillness.
We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate.
I'm no Buddhist monk, and I can't say I'm in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I've written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn't want or need, not all I did.
The one thing perhaps that technology hasn't always given us is a sense of how to make the wisest use of technology.
Playwrights have texts, composers have scores, painters and sculptors have the residue of those activities, and dance is traditionally an ephemeral, effervescent, here-today-gone-tomorrow kind of thing.
Since art is a virtue of the intellect, it demands to communicate with the entire universe of the intellect. Hence it is that the normal climate of art is intelligence and knowledge: its normal soil, the civilized heritage of a consistent and integrated system of beliefs and values; its normal horizon , the infinity of human experience enlighted by the passionate insight of anguish or the intellectual virtues of a contemplative mind.
Cities are beautiful because they are created slowly; they are made by time. A city is born from a tangle of monuments and infrastructures , culture and market, national history and everyday stories. It takes 500 years to create a city, 50 to create a neighborhood.
Hip-hop is a beautiful culture. It's inspirational, because it's a culture of survivors. You can create beauty out of nothingness.
I owe Bankhead a gift; she made a director out of me.
Above all, a well-imagined story is organized around extraordinary human behaviors and unexpected and startling events, which help illuminate the commonplace and the ordinary.
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