Pine Nuts: Culture, Chautauqua and Nevada’s birthday party

I ask, what do you get when you partner Mark Twain and Toccata? You get the grand reopening of the Mark Twain Cultural Center & Toccata Guttman Music Hall on Oct. 25. The Bohemian of the Sagebrush (humbly yours as Mark Twain) will kick off a yearlong party celebrating Nevada’s 150 years of statehood — our sesquicentennial.

The Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope will be followed two weeks later by the popular music of “Six Pac” on Nov. 8 at 7 p.m.

And just here I would like to offer some of my favorite quotes about the arts:

“Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.”

- Bertolt Brecht

“It is a gift to be able to paint a particular picture or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look. To affect the quality of the day — that is the highest of the arts.”

- Henry David Thoreau

“He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.”

- St. Francis of Assisi

“There is no way to success in art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If you ask me what I came here to do in this world, I, an artist, will tell you. I am here to live out loud.”

- Emile Zola

“Art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows beauty, that has music in its soul and the color of sunsets in its handkerchief, that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance too.”

- W.E.B. Dubois

“The future is what artists are. Art is what makes the life of each citizen a sacrament and not a speculation.”

- Oscar Wilde

“Music washes from the soul the dust of everyday life.”

- Berthold Auerbach

“An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.”

- Charles Cooley

“Chautauqua is the most American thing in America.”

- Theodore Roosevelt

And finally these powerful words from the father of our country, George Washington: “To encourage literature and the arts is a duty which every good citizen owes to his country.”

Learn more about McAvoy Layne at www.ghostoftwain.com.