The ocean, whose tides respond, like women's menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in... which human life begins, the ocean on whose surface vessels (personified as female) can ride but in whose depth sailors meet their death and monsters conceal themselves ... it is unstable and threatening as the earth is not; it spawns new life daily, yet swallows up lives; it is changeable like the moon, unregulated, yet indestructible and eternal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Paper is soft and ink is fluid; it might be better if some pages of this chronicle could be written on chips of granite at the poi...nt of steel.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we have largely forgotten the physical discomforts of the itching, oppressive garments of the past ... then we have mercifully ...forgotten, too, the smells of the past, the domestic odours--ill-washed flesh; infrequently changed underwear; chamber-pots; slop-pails; inadequately plumbed privies; rotting food; unattended teeth; and the streets are no fresher than indoors, the omnipresent acridity of horse piss and dung, drains, the sudden stench of old death from butchers' shops, the amniotic horror of the fishmonger.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Enormous Room seems to me to be the book that has nearest approached the mood of reckless adventure in which men will reach th...e white heat of imagination needed to fuse the soggy disjointed complexity of the industrial life about us into seething fluid of creation. There can be no more playing safe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Lost at night in an immense forest, I only have a small light to guide me. A man appears who tells me: "My friend, blow out your c...andle in order to find your way." This man is a theologian. The sea, fluid garden filled with animals and plants.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is... a transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and holds it fluid.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to his thoughts. The one esteems nature as rooted and fast; ...the other, as fluid, and impresses his being thereon.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Society is an illusion to the young citizen. It lies before him in rigid repose, with certain names, men, and institutions, rooted... like oak-trees to the centre, round which all arrange themselves the best they can. But the old statesman knows that society is fluid; there are no such roots and centres; but any particle may suddenly become the centre of the movement, and compel the system to gyrate round it, as every man of strong will, like Pisistratus, or Cromwell, does for a time, and every man of truth, like Plato, or Paul, does forever.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a mischievous notion that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plasti...c and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint. They adapt to themselves to it as they may; but in proportion as a man has anything in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes his signet and form.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Athletes and actors--let actors stand for the set of performing artists--share much. They share the need to make gesture as fluid ...and economical as possible, to make out of a welter of choices the single, precisely right one. They share the need for impeccable and split-second timing. They share the need for thousands of hours of practice in order to train the body to become the perfect, instinctive instrument to express. Both athlete and actor, out of that congeries of emotion, choice, strategy, knowledge of terrain, mood of spectators, condition of spectators in the ensemble, secret awareness of injury or weakness, and as nearly an absolute concentration as possible so that all externalities are integrated, all distraction absorbed to the self, must be able to change the self so successfully that it changes us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »