“I should like to have seen a gallery of coronation beauties, at Westminster Abbey, confronted for a moment by this band of Island girls; their stiffness, formality, and affectation contrasted with the artless vivacity and unconcealed natural graces of these savage maidens. It would be the Venus de Medici placed beside a milliners doll.”
—Herman Melville (18191891)
“It doesnt matter that your painting is small. Kopecks are also small, but when a lot are put together they make a ruble. Each painting displayed in a gallery and each good book that makes it into a library, no matter how small they may be, serves a great cause: accretion of the national wealth.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (18601904)
“The mad girl with the staring eyes and long white fingers
Hooked in the stones of the wall,”
—Robinson Jeffers (18871962)