Hunger makes you restless. You dream about food--not just any food, but perfect food, the best food, magical meals, famous and awe...-inspiring, the one piece of meat, the exact taste of buttery corn, tomatoes so ripe they split and sweeten the air, beans so crisp they snap between the teeth, gravy like mother's milk singing to your bloodstream.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, con...ceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Large department stores, with their luxuriant abundance of canned goods, foods, and clothing, are like the primary landscape and t...he geometrical locus of affluence. Streets with overcrowded and glittering store windows ... the displays of delicacies, and all the scenes of alimentary and vestimentary festivity, stimulate a magical salivation. Accumulation is more than the sum of its products: the conspicuousness of surplus, the final and magical negation of scarcity ... mimic a new-found nature of prodigious fecundity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the m...emory.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The absolute dependence of a newborn infant inspired many things in me, but it did not activate any magical knowledge about what t...o do for the next twenty years.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Homer sweeps us away by the irresistible movement of lines through a whole passage to a splendid climax. What counts is the single...ness of his effect, the unbroken maintenance of a heroic or tragic mood, the concentration on some action vividly imagined and clearly portrayed without irrelevance or second thoughts or even those hints that lure into bypaths of fancy and suggest that there is more in the words than is obvious at first sight. But in Virgil, great though the paragraphs are, compelling though the climax is when it is reached, we are more concerned with the details, with each small effect and each deftly placed word, than with the whole. We linger over the richness of single phrases, over the "pathetic half-lines," over the precision or potency with which a word illuminates a sentence or a happy sequence of sounds imparts an inexplicable charm to something that might otherwise have been trivial. Of course, Homer has his magical phrases and Virgil his bold effects, but the distinction stands. It is a matter of composition, of art, and it marks the real difference between the two kinds of epic, which are not so much "authentic" and "literary" as oral and written.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Attachment to a baby is a long-term process, not a single, magical moment. The opportunity for bonding at birth may be compared to... falling in love--staying in love takes longer and demands more work.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could fore...tell achievement.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »