(49) circumstances seem to be designed to bring out the best in us, and if we feel that we have been “wronged” then we are unlikely to begin a conscious effort to escape from our situation.
(50) The upside is the possibilities contained in knowing that everything is up to us; where before we were experts in the array of limitations, now we become authorities of what is possible.
(46)yet when one looks at the photographs of the gardens created by the homeless, it strikes one that, for all their diversity of styles, these gardens speak of various other fundamental urges, beyond that of decoration and creative expression.
(47) A sacred place of peace, however crude it may be, is a distinctly human need, as opposed to shelter, which is a distinctly animal need.
(48) The gardens of the homeless, which are in effect homeless gardens, introduce form into an urban environment where it either didn’t exist or was not discernible as such.
(49) most of us give in to a demoralization of spirit which we usually blame on some psychological conditions, until one day we find ourselves in a garden and feel the oppression vanish as if by magic.
(50) It is this implicit or explicit reference to nature that fully justifies the use of word garden, though in a “liberated” sense, to describe these synthetic constructions.
(46) It is also the reason why when we try to describe music with words, all we can do is articulate our reactions to it, and not grasp music itself.
(47) By all accounts he was a freethinking person, and a courageous one, and I find courage an essential quality for the understanding, let alone the performance, of his works.
(48) Beethoven’s habit of increasing the volume with an extreme intensity and then abruptly following it with a sudden soft passage was only rarely used by composers before him.
