You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance. – Charles Ives
But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be transcendental language in the most extravagant sense. – Charles Ives
There can be nothing exclusive about substantial art. It comes directly out of the heart of the experience of life and thinking about life and living life. – Charles Ives
A song has a few rights the same as ordinary citizens… if it happens to feel like flying where humans cannot fly… to scale mountains that are not there, who shall stop it? – Charles Ives
People who rarely read long books, or even short stories, still appreciate the greatest examples of the shortest literary genres. I have long been fascinated by these short genres. They seem to lie just where my heart is, somewhere between literature and philosophy. – Gary Saul Morson, The Long and Short of It: From Aphorism to Novel, 2012