The flattering, if arbitrary, label, First Lady of the Theatre, takes its toll. The demands are great, not only in energy but even...tually in dramatic focus. It is difficult, if not impossible, for a star to occupy an inch of space without bursting seams, cramping everyone else's style and unbalancing a play. No matter how self-effacing a famous player may be, he makes an entrance as a casual neighbor and the audience interest shifts to the house next door.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The first month of his absence I was numb and sick... And where he'd left his promise Life did not turn or kick. The seed, the seed of love was sick.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... today we round out the first century of a professed republic,--with woman figuratively representing freedom--and yet all free,... save woman.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A boy's hunched body loved out of a stalk The first song of his happiness, and the song woke... His heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So unrecorded did it slip away, So blind was I to see and to foresee,... So dull to mark the budding of my tree That would not blossom yet for many a May. If only I could recollect it, such A day of days! I let it come and go As traceless as a thaw of bygone snow; It seemed to mean so little, meant so much; If only now I could recall that touch, First touch of hand in hand--Did one but know!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men conceive themselves as morally superior to those with whom they differ in opinion. A Socialist who thinks that the opinions of... Mr. Gladstone on Socialism are unsound and his own sound, is within his rights; but a Socialist who thinks that his opinions are virtuous and Mr. Gladstone's vicious, violates the first rule of morals and manners in a Democratic country; namely, that you must not treat your political opponent as a moral delinquent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have witnessed, and greatly enjoyed, the first act of everything which Wagner created, but the effect on me has always been so p...owerful that one act was quite sufficient; whenever I have witnessed two acts I have gone away physically exhausted; and whenever I have ventured an entire opera the result has been the next thing to suicide.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Byron and Elvis Presley look alike, especially in strong-nosed Greek profile. In Glenarvon, a roman a clef about her affair with B...yron, Caroline Lamb says of her heroine's first glimpse of him, "The proud curl of the upper lip expressed haughtiness and bitter contempt." Presley's sneer was so emblematic that he joked about it. In a 1968 television special, he twitched his mouth and murmured, to audience laughter, "I've got something on my lip." The Romantic curling lip is aristocratic disdain: Presley is still called "the King," testimony to the ritual needs of a democratic populace. As revolutionary sexual personae, Byron and Presley had early and late styles: brooding menace, then urbane magnanimity. Their everyday manners were manly and gentle. Presley had a captivating soft-spoken charm. The Byronic hero, says Peter Thorslev, is "invariably courteous toward women." Byron and Presley were world-shapers, conduits of titanic force, yet they were deeply emotional and sentimental in a feminine sense.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »