The shadow of the Venetian blind on the painted wall, Shadows of the snake-plant and cacti, the plaster animals,... Focus the tragic melancholy of the bright stare Into nowhere, a hole like the black holes in space.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If the family were a container, it would be a nest, an enduring nest, loosely woven, expansive, and open. If the family were a fru...it, it would be an orange, a circle of sections, held together but separable--each segment distinct. If the family were a boat, it would be a canoe that makes no progress unless everyone paddles. If the family were a sport, it would be baseball: a long, slow, nonviolent game that is never over until the last out. If the family were a building, it would be an old but solid structure that contains human history, and appeals to those who see the carved moldings under all the plaster, the wide plank floors under the linoleum, the possibilities.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Christos-image is most difficult to disentangle... from its art-craft junk-shop paint-and-plaster medieval jumble of pain-worship and death-symbol.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too, But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;... And if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints, Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is no necessary connection between the important events of a life and the records of it that have been preserved in memory, ...in documents, in memorials, or in living testimony. The biographer must compose his life of what he has, just as the archeologist must restore his temple or his statue with such fragments as thieving time and careless men have left him; but fate often ironically leaves him a well-preserved leg and a dismembered torso, while the head, which would supply the main clue to the body, is missing. Hence, in addition to the purposive selection exercised by the subject himself and by the biographer in making use of such materials as are left, there exists a purely external selection dominated by chance, which cuts across the evidence in an arbitrary fashion. To correct for such distortions the biographer must be an anatomist of character: he must be able to restore the missing nose in plaster, even if he does not find the original marble.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is reality? I am a plaster doll; I pose... with eyes that cut open without landfall or nightfall upon some shellacked and grinning person, eyes that open, blue, steel, and close. Am I approximately an I. Magnin transplant?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The most foreign and picturesque structures on the Cape, to an inlander, not excepting the salt-works, are the windmills,--gray- l...ooking, octagonal towers, with long timbers slanting to the ground in the rear, and there resting on a cart-wheel, by which their fans are turned round to face the wind.... They looked loose and slightly locomotive, like huge wounded birds, trailing a wing or a leg, and reminded one of pictures of the Netherlands. Being on elevated ground, and high in themselves, they serve as landmarks,--for there are no tall trees, or other objects commonly, which can be seen at a distance in the horizon; though the outline of the land itself is so firm and distinct, that an insignificant cone, or even a precipice of sand, is visible at a great distance from over the sea. Sailors making the land commonly steer either by the windmills, or the meeting-houses. In the country, we are obliged to steer by the meeting-houses alone. Yet the meeting-house is a kind of windmill, which runs one day in seven, turned either by the winds of doctrine or public opinion, or more rarely by the winds of Heaven, where another sort of grist is ground, of which, if it be not all bran or musty, if it be not plaster, we trust to make the bread of life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The houses are from five to seven feet high, and all built upon one arbitrary plan--the ungraceful form of a dry-goods box. The si...des are daubed with a smooth white plaster, and tastefully frescoed aloft and alow with disks of camel-dung placed there to dry. This gives the edifice the romantic appearance of having been riddled with cannon-balls, and imparts to it a very pleasing effect. When the artist has arranged his materials with an eye to just proportion--the small and the large flakes in alternate rows, and separated by carefully-considered intervals--I know of nothing more cheerful to look upon than a spirited Syrian fresco. Nothing in this world has such a charm for me as to stand and gaze for hours and hours upon the inspired works of these old masters.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have always hated biography, and more especially, autobiography. If biography, the writer invariably finds it necessary to plast...er the subject with praises, flattery and adulation and to invest him with all the Christian graces. If autobiography, the same plan is followed, but the writer apologizes for it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »