It seemed a long way from 143rd Street. Shaking hands with the Queen of England was a long way from being forced to sit in the col...ored section of the bus going into downtown Wilmington, North Carolina. Dancing with the Duke of Devonshire was a long way from not being allowed to bowl in Jefferson City, Missouri, because the white customers complained about it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Majority rule is a precious, sacred thing worth dying for. But--like other precious, sacred things, such as the home and the famil...y--it's not only worth dying for; it can make you wish you were dead. Imagine if all of life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza. Every pair of pants, even those in a Brooks Brothers suit, would be stonewashed denim. Celebrity diet and exercise books would be the only thing on the shelves at the library. And--since women are a majority of the population--we'd all be married to Mel Gibson.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In spite of their obvious differences, folk art and popular art have much in common; they are easy to understand, they are romanti...c, patriotic, conventionally moral, and they are held in deep affection by those who are suspicious of the great arts. Popular artists can be serious, like Frederick Remington, or trivial, like Charles Dana Gibson; they can be men of genius like Chaplin or men of talent like Harold Lloyd; they can be as uni versal as Dickens or as parochial as E.P. Roe; one thing common to all of them is the power to communicate directly with everyone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Madam your wife and I didn't hit it off the only time I ever saw her. I won't say she was silly, but I think one of us was silly, ...and it wasn't me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A pragmatic race, the Japanese appear to have decided long ago that the only reason for drinking alcohol is to become intoxicated ...and therefore drink only when they wish to be drunk. So I went out into the night and the neon and let the crowd pull me along, walking blind, willing myself to be just a segment of that mass organism, just one more drifting chip of consciousness under the geodesics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Bobby read his future in women; his girls were omens, changes in the weather, and he'd sit all night in the Gentleman Loser waitin...g for the season to lay a new face down in front of him like a card.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Chrome: her pretty childface smooth as steel, with eyes that would have been at home at the bottom of some deep Atlantic trench, c...old gray eyes that lived under terrible pressure. They say she cooked her own cancers for people who crossed her, rococo custom variations that took years to kill you.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »