You cut up a thing that's alive and beautiful to find out how it's alive and why it's beautiful, and before you know it, it's neither of those things, and you're standing there with blood on your face and tears in your sight and only the terrible ache of guilt to show for it.
Interpretation
Analyzing beauty can destroy its essence.
This quote reflects on the notion that scrutinizing and dissecting something beautiful can lead to its destruction, both in terms of its physical form and its intrinsic value. It emphasizes the pain and guilt that accompany the act of trying to understand or analyze something living and beautiful, shedding light on the complexities of appreciation versus dissection.
In practice
In a discussion about art criticism, one might use this quote to highlight the negative impact of overly analytical approaches.
Of course it’s the apparently tranquil periods that deceive us. Though our instruments or our senses or our wits may not be able to see the processes that are leading toward these clusters of events, they’re happening. The star, the wheel, the butterfly—all are in a subtle state of unrest, waiting for the moment when some invisible mechanism signals that the time has come. Then the star explodes; the wheel makes poor men rich; the butterfly mates and dies.
We’re too much ourselves. Afraid of letting go of what we are, in case we are nothing, and holding on so tight, we lose everything else.
In this sense love is of a different order to any other phenomenon, for it may be both an event and a sign of that invisible mechanism I spoke of before; perhaps the finest sign, the most certain. In it’s throes we need neither luck nor science. We are the wheel, and the man who profits by it. We are the star, and the darkness it pierces. We are the butterfly, brief and beautiful.
Perhaps a wiser eye than hers would be able to read tomorrow in tonight's stars, but where was the fun in that? It was better not to know. Better to be alive in the Here and the Now--in this bright, laughing moment--and let the Hours to come take care of themselves.
With the inevitability of a tongue returning to probe a painful tooth, we come back and back and back again to our fears, sitting to talk them over with the eagerness of a hungry man before a full and steaming plate.
I'm not the expert on the great gameplay. I come in for the character design, monsters, atmosphere. I'm not the technician.
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
Artists live with God – but give their little finger to Satan. I sleep with the angels and dream of the devil.
You will have to write and put away or burn a lot of material before you are comfortable in this medium. You might as well start now and get the work done. For I believe that eventually quantity will make for quality.
It is the artist's function not to copy but to synthesise: to eliminate from that gross confusion of actuality which is his raw material whatever is accidental, idle, irrelevant, and select for perpetuation that only which is appropriate and immortal.
I think it's great when stories are dark and strange and weirdly personal.
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