Many people believe letters the most personal and revealing form of communication. In them, we expect to find the charmer at his n...ap, slumped, open-mouthed, profoundly himself without thought for appearances. Yet, this is not quite true. Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite so good for this purpose. In conversation, those uneasy eyes upon you, those lips ready with an emendation before you have begun to speak, are a powerful deterrent to unreality, even to hope.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite so good for th...is purpose.... In letters we can reform without practice, beg without humiliation, snip and shape embarrassing experiences to the measure of our own desires....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Boston is not a small New York, as they say a child is not a small adult but is, rather, a specially organized small creature with... its small-creature's temperature, balance, and distribution of fat. In Boston there is an utter absence of that wild electric beauty of New York, of the marvelous, excited rush of people in taxicabs at twilight, of the great Avenues and Streets, the restaurants, theatres, bars, hotels, delicatessens, shops. In Boston the night comes down with an incredibly heavy, small-town finality. The cows come home; the chickens go to roost; the meadow is dark. Nearly every Bostonian is in his house or in someone else's house, dining at the home board, enjoying domestic and social privacy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The fifties--they seem to have taken place on a sunny afternoon that asked nothing of you except a drifting belief in the moment a...nd its power to satisfy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sex can no longer be the germ, the seed of fiction. Sex is an episode, most properly conveyed in an episodic manner, quickly, ofte...n ironically. It is a bursting forth of only one of the cells in the body of the omnipotent "I," the one who hopes by concentration of tone and voice to utter the sound of reality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The language of the younger generation ... has the brutality of the city and an assertion of threatening power at hand, not to com...e. It is military, theatrical, and at its most coherent probably a lasting repudiation of empty courtesy and bureaucratic euphemism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mothers born on relief have their babies on relief. Nothingness, truly, seems to be the condition of these New York people.... The...y are nomads going from one rooming house to another, looking for a toilet that functions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »