Here is a collection of thoughts and writings I've gathered from books as well as across the web which I have resonated with or found useful:

“The cultural industries do have the power constantly to rework and reshape what they represent; and, by repetition and selection, to impose and implant such definitions of ourselves as fit more easily the descriptions of the dominant or preferred culture. That is what the concentration of cultural power – the means of culture-making in the heads of the few – actually means. These definitions don’t have the power to occupy our minds; they don’t function on us as if we are blank screens. But they do occupy and rework the interior contradictions of feeling and perception in the dominated classes; they do find or clear a space of recognition in those who respond to them. The danger arises because we tend to think of cultural forms as whole and coherent: either wholly corrupt or wholly authentic. Whereas, they are deeply contradictory; they play on contradictions, especially when they function in the domain of the ‘popular’…from period to period, the contents of each category changes. Popular forms become enhanced in cultural value, go up the cultural escalator – and find themselves on the opposite side. Other things cease to have high cultural value, and are appropriated into the popular, becoming transformed in the process…the important fact, then, is not a mere descriptive inventory – which may have a negative effect of freezing popular culture into some timeless descriptive mould – but the relations of power which are constantly punctuating and dividing the domain of culture into its preferred and its residual categories.”

- Stuart Hall

“Nostalgia seems now to mark out a particular type of attention. If you call something “nostalgic”, you are suggesting that it evokes a memory of a former pleasure, a bitter-sweet recognition of the passing of time, or a sense of a lost era. To be nostalgic oneself is to experience those (possibly quietly melancholic) pleasures…there are two corollaries of this form of emotional attention to the past. The first is that the past remains selectively attractive; there is no misery, violence, prejudice or despair in a Hovis ad. The second is that linking the past and the present in such a way as to work to change things for the future is discouraged. Nostalgia in this sense is the very opposite of the force for change that Shelley or Nietzsche or Wagner saw in their longing for an idealised Greek past. Its best hope is what Wagner called “slavish – restoration”. Today’s constant talk of nostalgia…is in part a response to rapid social change and feelings of insecurity. In part, it is what anyone who is growing older might feel, as their childhood becomes vividly distant. But these nostalgic images are a shoddy replacement for any sophisticated understanding of history – the complex story of the past, and the intricate forces that link the past and the present – and that is why we should be worried when politicians play the nostalgia card. When we forget that the questions “where have we come from?” and “where are we going?” are integrally linked, we drastically reduce our chances of self-understanding or effective action. If we oversimplify history, we will live – as both Cicero and Kant predicted – with the shallow mindfulness of children.”

– Simon Goldhill

"The actor is a worker. Overt romanticising of her labour leads to her self-segregation. The actor is embedded in the social relationships of intimacy and work. Otherwise, she is just fluff. She is a commentator, an enabler in the alchemy of the collective thought. But so is the baker, and so is the bump. The actor is hardly in between. She can't escape the materialities of existence. Otherwise, her theatricality becomes unnecessary, and if so is her fault, for if she sets herself apart she betrays the contract that gives reason to her craft: that of co-presence, in spite of a fictional wall."

- Felipe Cervera

"I also have now and then experienced moments of such intensity that they might be called epiphanies. It seems to me that theatre is perhaps particularly well suited as an art to generate such moments because it constantly oscillates between the fleeting present and the stillness of infinity....Such moments of apotheosis are not everyday occurences, of course....Such moments will be different for every theatregoer, but I feel certain that we all have them, and treasure them. In an art that lives by, and survives largely in, the memory, such experiences have served me as touchstones, as permanent reminders of what I have been seeking in a lifetime of theatregoing."

- Marvin Carlson

"There is another art capable of further developments, which also springs from contemporary feeling. Not only is it simultaneously it's echo and mirror but it possesses also an awakening prophetic power which can have far-reaching and profound effect.

The spiritual life to which art belongs, and of which it is one of the mightiest agents, is a complex but definite move above and beyond, which can be translated into simplicity. This movement is that of cognition. Although it may take different forms, it holds basically to the same internal meaning and purpose.

The causes of the necessity to move forward and upward—through sweat, suffering, evil and torments—are obscure. When a stage has been reached at which obstacles have been cleared from the way, a hidden, malevolent hand scatter new obstacles. The path often seems blocked or destroyed. But someone always comes to the rescue—someone like ourselves in everything, but with a secretly implanted power of "vision".

He sees and points out. The power to do this he would sometimes fain lay aside, for it is a bitter cross to bear. But he cannot do so. Scorned and disliked, he drags the heavy weight of resisting humanity, ever forwards and upwards.

Sometimes, after his body has vanished from the earth, men try by every means to recreate it in marble, iron, bronze, or stone and on an enormous scale. As though there were any intrinsic value in the bodily existence of such divine martyrs and servants of humanity, who despised the flesh but wanted only to serve the spirit. But raising marble is evidence that a number of men have reached the point where once the being they would now honour, stood alone."

- Wassily Kadinsky