Nothing is so discreet as a young face, for nothing is less mobile; it has the serenity, the surface smoothness, and the freshness... of a lake. There is no character in women's faces before the age of thirty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The secret affinity between gambling and the desert: the intensity of gambling reinforced by the presence of the desert all around... the town. The air-conditioned freshness of the gaming rooms, as against the radiant heat outside. The challenge of all the artificial lights to the violence of the sun's rays. Night of gambling sunlit on all sides; the glittering darkness of these rooms in the middle of the desert. Gambling itself is a desert form, inhuman, uncultured, initiatory, a challenge to the natural economy of value, a crazed activity on the fringes of exchange. But it too has a strict limit and stops abruptly; its boundaries are exact, its passion knows no confusion. Neither the desert nor gambling are open areas; their spaces are finite and concentric, increasing in intensity toward the interior, toward a central point, be it the spirit of gambling or the heart of the desert--a privileged, immemorial space, where things lose their shadow, where money loses its value, and where the extreme rarity of traces of what signals to us there leads men to seek the instantaneity of wealth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality an...d spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When Philosophy with its abstractions paints grey in grey, the freshness and life of youth has gone, the reconciliation is not a r...econciliation in the actual, but in the ideal world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I would wish that the women of our country could embrace ... [the responsibilities] of citizenship as peculiarly their own. If the...y could apply their higher sense of service and responsibility, their freshness of enthusiasm, their capacity for organization to this problem, it would become, as it should become, an issue of profound patriotism. The whole plane of political life would be lifted.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The ambition which leads me on is an anxious desire and a fixed determination to return to the people unimpaired the sacred trust ...they have confided to my charge; to heal the wounds of the Constitution and preserve it from further violation; to persuade my countrymen, so far as I may, that it is not in a splendid government supported by powerful monopolies and aristocratical establishments that they will find happiness or their liberties protection, but in a plain system, void of pomp, protecting all and granting favors to none, dispensing its blessings, like the dews of Heaven, unseen and unfelt save in the freshness and beauty they contribute to produce. It is such a government that the genius of the people requires; such an [sic] one only under which our states may remain for ages to come united, prosperous, and free.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And the unfailing sense of being young Spread out like a spring-woken tree, wherein... That hidden freshness sung, That certainty of time laid up in store....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There was a continuous movement now, from Zone Five to Zone Four. And from Zone Four to Zone Three, and from us, up the pass. Ther...e was a lightness, a freshness, and an enquiry and a remaking and an inspiration where there had been only stagnation. And closed frontiers. For this is how we all see it now.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had qui...te probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The image cannot be dispossessed of a primordial freshness, which idea can never claim. An idea is derivative and tamed. The image... is in the natural or wild state, and it has to be discovered there, not put there, obeying its own law and none of ours. We think we can lay hold of image and take it captive, but the docile captive is not the real image but only the idea, which is the image with its character beaten out of it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »