Famous quotes containing the words opera, composition, history, paris and/or version:
“The opera house sparkled with tiers
And tiers of eyes, like mine enlarged by belladonna,”
—James Merrill (b. 1926)
“Pushkin’s composition is first of all and above all a phenomenon of style, and it is from this flowered rim that I have surveyed its seep of Arcadian country, the serpentine gleam of its imported brooks, the miniature blizzards imprisoned in round crystal, and the many-hued levels of literary parody blending in the melting distance.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If Paris lived now, and preferred beauty to power and riches, it would not be called his Judgment, but his Want of Judgment.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“It is never the thing but the version of the thing:
The fragrance of the woman not her self,
Her self in her manner not the solid block,
The day in its color not perpending time,
Time in its weather, our most sovereign lord,
The weather in words and words in sounds of sound.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)