The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything--gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness--rediscovers its...elf at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations.... To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we speak the word "life," it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to t...hat fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Love seeketh only self to please, To bind another to its delight,... Joys in another's loss of ease, And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... in 1950 a very large slice of the white South stood at the crossroads in its attitude toward its colored citizens and [was] ps...ychologically capable of turning either way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The American novel tends to rest in contradictions and among extreme ranges of experience. When it attempts to resolve contradicti...ons, it does so in oblique, morally equivocal ways. As a general rule, it does so either in melodramatic actions or in pastoral idylls, although intermixed with both one may find the stirring instabilities of "American humor." These qualities constitute the uniqueness of that branch of the novelistic tradi tion which has flourished in this country. They help to account for the strong element of "romance" in the American "novel." By contrast, the English novel has followed a middle way. It is notable for its great practical sanity, its powerful, engrossing composition of wide ranges of experience into a moral centrality and equability of judgment. Oddity, distortion of personality, dislocations of normal life, recklessness of behavior--these the English novel has included. Yet the profound poetry of disorder we find in the American novel is missing, with rare exceptions, from the English.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Language is like soil. However rich, it is subject to erosion, and its fertility is constantly threatened by uses that exhaust its... vitality. It needs constant re-invigoration if it is not to become arid and sterile.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Propaganda has a bad name, but its root meaning is simply to disseminate through a medium, and all writing therefore is propaganda... for something. It's a seeding of the self in the consciousness of others.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and "...mangled mind" leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »