When you're writing, you're conjuring. It's a ritual, and you need to be brave and respectful and sometimes get out of the way of whatever it is that you're inviting into the room.
Tom WaitsRead
Photos are profound because they have such short lives. They are more like fingerprints, dead leaves, rain puddles, or the corpses of flies.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Photos capture fleeting moments, reflecting the transient nature of life.
In this quote, Tom Waits suggests that photographs possess a deep significance despite their impermanence. Much like fingerprints or fallen leaves, they capture brief moments in time, evoking emotions and memories that are both beautiful and ephemeral, reminding us of the fragility of existence and the inevitability of change.
Themes
PhotographyEphemeralityMemoryArtTransience
In practice
Example use cases
During a photography exhibition, one might use this quote to emphasize the beauty found in fleeting moments.
More from Tom Waits
All quotes βIf you're in the middle of the ocean with no flippers and no life preserver and you hear a helicopter, this is music. You have to adjust to your needs at the moment.
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I knelt at the altar of Ray Charles for years. I worked at a restaurant, and that's all there was on the jukebox.
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Don't plant your bad days. They grow into weeks. The weeks grow into months. Before you know it, you got yourself a bad year. Take it from me - choke those little bad days. Choke 'em down to nothing.
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My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.
Tom WaitsRead
Now its raining its pouring the old man is snoring now I lay me down to sleep I hear the sirens in the street all my dreams are made of chrome I have no way to get back home Iβd rather die before I wake like Marilyn Monroe and throw my dreams out in the street and the rain make βem grow
Tom WaitsRead
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l photograph what l do not wish to paint and l paint that which l cannot photograph.
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As to the number of novels I've abandoned... I shudder to think. I have thrown away five completed novels, and that's a gruesome enough figure. But not necessarily a waste of effort.
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Copy is not written. If anyone tells you βyou write copyβ, sneer at them. Copy is not written. Copy is assembled. You do not write copy, you assemble it. You are working with a series of building blocks, you are putting the building blocks together, and then you are putting them in certain structures, you are building a little city of desire for your person to come and live in.
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The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to entertain, to make things up. The art of what I do lies not in research or even recollection but primarily in invention.
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Bright-eyed Fancy, hov'ring o'er, Scatters from her pictured urn Thoughts that breathe and words that burn.
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