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Prince Wen Hui's cook was cutting up an ox.... The ox fell apart with a whisper. The bright cleaver murmured like a gentle wind. Rhythm! Timing! Like a sacred dance.... Prince Wen Hui: Good work! Your method is faultless! The cook: Method? What I follow is Tao beyond all methods! When I first began to cut up oxen I would see before me the whole ox all in one mass. After three years I no longer saw this mass. I saw the distinctions. But now I see nothing with the eye. My whole being apprehends. My senses are idle. The spirit free to work without plan follows its own instinct guided by natural line, by the secret opening, the hidden space, my cleaver finds its own way... Then I withdraw the blade, I stand still and let the joy of the work sink in. I clean the blade and put it away. Prince Wan Hui: This is it! My cook has shown me how I ought to live my own life!

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May 03, 2024

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Quote Author: Ernest J. Gaines

Ernest J. Gaines

Ernest J. Gaines

Ernest J. Gaines (b. January 15, 1933), a prominent African-American fiction writer, is a writer-in-residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His 1993 novel, A Lesson Before Dying , won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In 2004, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Gaines has been a MacArthur Foundation fellow, inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, awarded the National Humanities Medal, and inducted into the French Order of Arts and Letters as a Chevalier. Gaines's fiction has received critical acclaim. His works have been taught in college classrooms and translated into many languages, including French, Spanish, German, Russian, and Chinese. Four of his works have been produced into television movies.

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