Though most of us don't hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, y...ou have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes. Animals that hear high frequencies better than we do--bats and dolphins, for instance--seem to see richly with their ears, hearing geographically, but for us the world becomes most densely informative, most luscious, when we take it in through our eyes. It may even be that abstract thinking evolved from our eyes' elaborate struggle to make sense of what they saw. Seventy percent of the body's sense receptors cluster in the eyes, and it is mainly through seeing the world that we appraise and understand it. Lovers close their eyes when they kiss because, if they didn't, there would be too many visual distractions to notice and analyze.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Impossible Generalized Man today is the critic who believes in loving those unworthy of love as well as those worthy--yet beli...eves this only insofar as no personal risk is entailed. Meaning he loves no one, worthy or no. This is what makes him impossible.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Grovelling, intimate words,... heart-stealing flattery, a tight embrace of my thinner-than-thin body, violent kisses all over-- obviously, getting angry is worth the risk, but even still, I'm not interested. My lover is dear to my heart, so how could I be like that on purpose?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
risk is full: every living thing in siege: the demand is life, to keep life: the small... white blacklegged egret, how beautiful, quietly stalks and spears the shallows, darts to shore to stab--LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Kemmerick: He's dead. He's dead. Katczinsky: Why did you risk your life bringing him in?... Kemmerick: But it's Behm. My friend. Katczinsky: It's a corpse, no matter who it is.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The man, or the boy, in his development is psychologically deterred from incorporating serving characteristics by an easily observ...able fact: there are already people around who are clearly meant to serve and they are girls and women. To perform the activities these people are doing is to risk being, and being thought of, and thinking of oneself, as a woman. This has been made a terrifying prospect and has been made to constitute a major threat to masculine identity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are no little events in life, those we think of no consequence may be full of fate, and it is at our own risk if we neglect ...the acquaintances and opportunities that seem to be casually offered, and of small importance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To dream magnificently is not a gift given to all men, and even for those who possess it, it runs a strong risk of being progressi...vely diminished by the ever-growing dissipation of modern life and by the restlessness engendered by material progress. The ability to dream is a divine and mysterious ability; because it is through dreams that man communicates with the shadowy world which surrounds him. But this power needs solitude to develop freely; the more one concentrates, the more one is likely to dream fully, deeply.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The local is a shabby thing. There's nothing worse than bringing us back down to our own little corner, our own territory, the rad...iant promiscuity of the face to face. A culture which has taken the risk of the universal, must perish by the universal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The modern American tourist now fills his experience with pseudo-events. He has come to expect both more strangeness and more fami...liarity than the world naturally offers. He has come to believe that he can have a lifetime of adventure in two weeks and all the thrills of risking his life without any real risk at all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »