The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to kee...p on looking.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and... to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the battle field.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A language is therefore a horizon, and style a vertical dimension, which together map out for the writer a Nature, since he does n...ot choose either. The language functions negatively, as the initial limit of the possible, style is a Necessity which binds the writer's humour to his form of expression. In the former, he finds a familiar History, in the latter, a familiar personal past. In both cases he deals with a Nature, that is, a familiar repertory of gestures, a gestuary, as it were, in which the energy expended is purely operative, serving here to enumerate, there to transform, but never to appraise or signify a choice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; ...it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical fi...eld of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of... time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Computers were originally just supposed to be number-crunchers, but now their number-crunching has been harnessed in a thousand im...aginative ways to create new virtual machines, such as video games and word processors, in which the underlying number-crunching is almost invisible, and in which new powers seem quite magical. Our brains, similarly, weren't designed (except for some very recent peripheral organs) for word processing, but now a large portion--perhaps even the lion's share--of the activity that takes place in adult human brains is involved in a sort of word processing: speech production and comprehension, and the serial rehearsal and rearrangement of linguistic items, or better, their neural surrogates. And these activities magnify and transform the underlying hardware powers in ways that seem (from the "outside") quite magical.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The inspired scribbler always has the gift for gossip in our common usage ... he or she can always inspire the commonplace with an... uncommon flavor, and transform trivialities by some original grace or sympathy or humor or affection.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the deman...ds on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children's adaptive capacity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »