Category Archives: Quotations

Things people said.

Landscapes with High Horizon Lines, Shot Through with Blood and Shrapnel

Posted on March 9, 2025 by JMN

His layers of paint, a mudlike impasto, oil and acrylic paints mixed with raw materials like soil, iron, straw and dead leaves, form deep furrows on the canvas. These landscapes, with van Gogh’s high horizon lines, all seem to be … Continue reading →

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There’ll Always Be an England: For Exquisitely Nuanced Class Distinctions

Posted on February 7, 2025 by JMN

“She went to girls’ schools and was taught French, and history, and geography, and music, and painting, the usual things that a… middle class? You might say middle class. She was really more of the sort of upper yeoman peasant … Continue reading →

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How Disparate Writings Intertwine

Posted on January 27, 2025 by JMN

“Over the past eight years, I have been tested and challenged more than any president in our 250-year history.” (Donald Trump, from Second Inaugural Address) Mr. Trump dictates revelation for his irrupting dispensation. There are impromptu connections one makes in … Continue reading →

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My Favorite Typo Occurs in Today’s New York Times

Posted on January 25, 2025 by JMN

There was talk of expanding the welfare stare, certainly, but Sanders’s Medicare for All was not at the heart of these fights, nor was rolling back globalization, as with the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization. (New York Times, … Continue reading →

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Homelessness in the Homeland: The Nursery View

Posted on November 21, 2024 by JMN

There was an old womanLived under a hill;And if she’s not gone,She lives there still. (From In the Nursery of My Book House, ed. by Olive Beaupré Miller, 1937) (c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

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Where Dems Fell Foul of the Electorate, On Charcoal, and Living in the Moment

Posted on November 16, 2024 by JMN

“We were never anywhere other than where we were.” (Ben Tarnoff) Now and then I let the me called self remain unsure of something when I know full well I could resolve doubt with a peek at the internet known … Continue reading →

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‘Enough of This Tomfoolery!’ (God)

Posted on November 7, 2024 by JMN

“The Dallas-Fort Worth region is home to more than 6,500 houses of worship, the highest concentration in the top 10 largest urban regions in the country, according to the 2020 U.S. religion census. Four of the 20 largest churches in … Continue reading →

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‘The Gravity of Curiosity’

Posted on October 31, 2024 by JMN

… The gravity of curiosity. Our lives should be lived in interrogatives rather than imperatives. It’s more magnanimous to move through the world with wonder than with unearned certainty… [Poems] encourage us to ask the complicated questions, both of ourselves … Continue reading →

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‘It’s Death in a Modern Setting’

Posted on October 28, 2024 by JMN

Whether it’s taken as a grin or a snarl, all skulls bare their teeth; it goes with being a skull. But sometimes an art historian is in pursuit of a story to tell — it goes with being an art … Continue reading →

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‘Attention Is the Rarest and Purest Form of Generosity’

Posted on October 24, 2024 by JMN

Between “passionate” and “dispassionate,” why not the latter? Having a “passion” for something threatens to be trite. “Passion” emits heat, and there’s enough heat circulating already. How about “devotion” instead? I’m devoted to the art of mimickry. A bent for imitation, … Continue reading →

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