The New Testament is an invaluable book, though I confess to having been slightly prejudiced against it in my very early days by t...he church and the Sabbath-school, so that it seemed, before I read it, to be the yellowest book in the catalogue. Yet I early escaped from their meshes. It is hard to get the commentaries out of one's head and taste its true flavor.... It would be a poor story to be prejudiced against the Life of Christ because the book has been edited by Christians. In fact, I love this book rarely, though it is a sort of castle in the air to me, which I am permitted to dream.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Freud was, in effect, trying to take the mystery out of myth. Once it was decoded as a history of the unconscious, all was explain...ed. As Anthony Storr put it: "he was only happy when he was reducing things to the lowest common factor; and he did regard the unconscious as primarily the repository of bits of oneself that one couldn't accept." A very different way of looking at the psychology of myth was developed by Freud's one-time friend and colleague Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). The fundamental difference between the two is immediately apparent in Jung's dictum that modern man is faced with "the necessity of rediscovering the life of the spirit." Jung, who was very interested in archaeology and thought of himself as excavating the mind, took myths to represent the inmost thoughts and feelings of the human race, patterns which are the product of inherited brain patterns.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Managing Editor: That's rotten. 'Costello slaying starts gang war.' That's what I want. Copy Chief: I'm working on that angle.... I've got four men on it. Managing Editor: Four. You'll need forty men on this story for the next five years. You know what's happening. This town is up for the grabs, get me. You know Costello was the last of the old- fashioned gang leaders. There's a new crew coming out, and every guy that's got money enough to buy a gun is going to try to step in his place. You see, they'll be shooting each other like rabbits for the control of the booze business. You get it. It'll be just like war. That's it--war. You put that in the lead. War--gang war.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All is changed. All looks strange to me and gives me a feeling which I would rather get away from, although I know it to be the ca...rrying out of natural laws. And I am not complaining. I am doing the same as many old people have done, I suppose, who have led an active life and suddenly find themselves living without a purpose. Oh, my heart is so full. I could write a big book on the subject of going out of this world gracefully.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... God allows the wheat and the tares to grow up together, and ... the tares frequently get the start of the wheat and kill it ou...t. The only difference between the wheat and human beings is that the latter have intellect and ought to combine and pull out the tares, root and branch.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Kitchens were different then, too--not only what came out of them, but their smells and sounds. A hot pie cooling smells different... from a frozen pie thawing. Oilcloth and linoleum and apples in an open bowl and ruffled rubber aprons make a different aromatic mix from Formica and ceramic tile and mangoes in an acrylic fruit ripener and plastic-coated aprons printed with "Who invited all these tacky people?" And the kitchen sounds. I am not sure that today's kitchen is noisier. But the noises are different. Today you get the song of the food processor and the blender, the intermittent hum of the reefer and the freezer, the buzz-slosh-and-grunt of the dishwasher, the violently audible digestive processes of the waste disposal in the sink. Then it was the whir and clatter of the hand-powered eggbeater, the thunk-thunk-thunk of somebody mashing potatoes, or, in green-pea season, the crisp pop of pea pod and the rattle-rattle-rattle of peas into the pan.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As debate is rare in the House of Representatives, since nearly all real business is done in the committees, it is very natural th...at such debate as there is should be very oratorical, should be "sounding off," not discussion. And this is one of the reasons why public speaking in America is still so rhetorical, why audiences for example do not often "heckle" a speaker, bombard him with questions, or embarrass him with ironical applause or laughter. It is almost as rare to interrupt a political speech as it is to interrupt a sermon. In the Senate, things are different. Any senator who can get the floor can talk as long as his wind lasts. He cannot be out of order unless he takes the most extravagant liberties. So Senate debates are often lively, often educational. They are very different from the formal pieces declaimed in the other house, or even printed and sent to the voters without being spoken at all. A senator has to persuade his colleagues, even those of his own party, or he has to intimidate them, and so the Senate has a high representation of public speakers who can discuss as well as declaim.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Wee image of my bonnie Betty, I fatherly will kiss and daut thee,... As dear an' near my heart I set thee Wi' as guid will, As a' the priests had seen me get thee That's out o' hell.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Memory and forgetfulness are as life and death to one another. To live is to remember and to remember is to live. To die is to for...get and to forget is to die. Everything is so much involved in and is so much a process of its opposite that, as it is almost fair to call death a process of life and life a process of death, so it is to call memory a process of forgetting and forgetting a process of remembering. There is never either absolute memory or absolute forgetfulness, absolute life or absolute death. So with light and darkness, heat and cold, you never get either all the light or all the heat out of anything. So with God and the devil; so with everything. Everything is like a door swinging backwards and forwards. Everything has a little of that from which it is most remote and to which it is most opposed and these antitheses serve to explain one another.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »