For a symbol is like a rock dropped into a pool: it sends out ripples in all directions, and the ripples are in motion. Who can sa...y where the last ripple disappears? One may have a sense that he at least knows approximately the center point of all those ripples, the point at which the stone struck the water. Yet even then he has trouble marking it precisely. How does one make a mark on water? ... The ripples continue to move and the light to change on the water and the longer one watches the more changes he sees. And such shifting-and-being-at-the-same-instant is of the very sparkle and life of poetry. Of poetry and of life itself. For the poem is a dynamic and living thing. One experiences it as one experiences life--as everybody but Mr. Gradgrind experiences life. One is never done with it: every time he looks he sees something new, and it changes even as he watches. And that very sense of continuity in fluidity is one of the kinds of knowledge, one of the ways of knowing, that only the arts can teach, poetry foremost among them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Never before has a generation of parents faced such awesome competition with the mass media for their children's attention. While ...parents tout the virtues of premarital virginity, drug-free living, nonviolent resolution of social conflict, or character over physical appearance, their values are daily challenged by television soaps, rock music lyrics, tabloid headlines, and movie scenes extolling the importance of physical appearance and conformity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... probably all of the women in this book are working to make part of the same quilt to keep us from freezing to death in a world... that grows harsher and bleaker--where male is the norm and the ideal human being is hard, violent and cold: a macho rock. Every woman who makes of her living something strong and good is sharing bread with us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
With the present wage conditions there are thousands of young women who are living in a state of semi-starvation and they are alwa...ys surrounded by the most terrible temptation. Oh, I know that some of [the] greatest reformers insist that a girl's virtue is not affected by under-nourishment, disease and nervous collapse; but if these well housed, well fed, well dressed people were put in a dirty, ugly room, if their clothes did not protect them from the cold, if their stomachs were never filled, would not even the staunchest lose some of her self-respect when looking forward to an old age? It is only a matter of wonder to me that so many girls keep clean and decent through it all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And true, they are hurling spittle, rock, Garbage and fruit in Little Rock.... And I saw coiling storm a-writhe On bright madonnas. And a scythe Of men harassing brownish girls.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As I define it, rock & roll is dead. The attitude isn't dead, but the music is no longer vital. It doesn't have the same meaning. ...The attitude, though, is still very much alive--and it still informs other kinds of music.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »