Art knows no happier moment than the opportunity to show the symmetry of an extreme, during that moment of spheric harmony when th...e dissonance dissolves for the blink of an eye, dissolves into a blissful harmony, when the most extreme opposites, coming together from the greatest alienation, fleetingly touch with lips of the word and of love.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to... possess money or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice. Those who have money will display it in every imaginable way. If their ostentation does not exceed their fortune, all will be well. But if their ostentation does exceed their fortune they will ruin themselves. In such a country, the greatest fortunes will vanish in the twinkling of an eye. Those who don't have money will ruin themselves with vain efforts to conceal their poverty. That is one kind of affluence: the outward sign of wealth for a small number, the mask of poverty for the majority, and a source of corruption for all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at th...e last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual.... There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
See what a grace was seated on this brow: Hyperion's curls, the front of Jove himself,... An eye like Mars, to threaten and command.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...when I have formed the sounds, said the words out loud, those who had assumed Yiddish was a language of the past only, suddenly... felt it had been revived. As my tongue, mouth, lips, throat, lungs physically pushed Yiddish into the world--as I, a Jew, spoke a Jewish language to other Jews--Yiddish was very much alive. Not unlike a lebn geblibene, a survivor, of an overwhelming catastrophe, it seemed to be saying 'khbin nisht vos ikh bin amol geven. I am not what I once was. Ober 'khbin nisht geshtorbn. Ikh leb. But I did not die. I live.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The true novel wrestles on the edge of understanding, lying about on all sides desperately, for every sort of experience, pressing... into use every flash of intuition or correspondence, trying to fuse together the crudest of materials, and the humblest, which the higher arts can't include. But it is precisely here, where the writer fights with the raw, the intractable, that poetry is born. Poetry, that is, of the novel: appropriate to it. The Story of an African Farm is a poetic novel; and when one has done with the "plot" and the characters, that is what remains: an endeavor, a kind of hunger, that passionate desire for growth and understanding, which is the deepest pulse of human beings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »