She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to sh...ow. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself; in language with... pleasurable accessories, each kind brought in separately in the parts of the work; in a dramatic, not in a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions. If oxen and horses and lions had hands and were able to draw with their hands and do the same things as men, horses would draw the shapes of gods to look like horses and oxen to look like oxen, and each would make the gods' bodies have the same shape as they themselves had.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To my fancy, one looks back on life, it has only two responsibilities, which include all the others: one is the bringing of new li...fe into existence; the other, educating it after it is brought in. All betrayals of trust result from these original sins.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Chaucer's characters are sufficiently distinct from one another, but they are too little varied in themselves, too much like ident...ical propositions.... Chaucer's characters are narrative, Shakespeare's dramatic, Milton's epic. That is, Chaucer told only as much of his story as he pleased, as was required for a particular purpose. He answered for his characters himself. In Shakespeare they are introduced upon the stage, are liable to be asked all sorts of questions, and are forced to answer for themselves. In Chaucer we perceive a fixed essence of character. In Shakespeare there is a continual composition and decomposition of its elements, a fermentation of every particle in the whole mass, by its alternate affinity to other principles which are brought in contact with it. Till the experiment is tried, we do not know the result, the turn which the character will take in its new circumstances.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nobody can desire what is ultimately damaging to him. If in individual cases it does appear to be so after all--and perhaps it alw...ays does so appear--this is explained by the fact that someone in the person demands something that is, admittedly, of use to someone, but which to a second someone, who is brought in half in order to judge the case, is gravely damaging. If the person had from the very beginning, and not only when it came to judging the case, taken his stand at the side of the second someone, the first someone would have faded out, and with him the desire.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just as the mother's womb holds us for ten months not in preparation for itself but for the region to which we seem to be discharg...ed when we are capable of drawing breath and surviving in the open, so in the span extending from infancy to old age we are ripening for another birth. Another beginning awaits us, another status. We cannot yet bear heaven's light except at intervals; look unfalteringly, then, to that decisive hour which is the body's last but not the soul's. All that lies about you look upon as the luggage in a posting station; you must push on. At your departure Nature strips you as bare as at your entry. You cannot carry out more than you brought in; indeed, you must lay down a good part of what you brought into life. The envelope of skin, which is your last covering, will be stripped off; the flesh and the blood which is diffused and courses through the whole of it will be stripped off; the bones and sinews which are the structural support of the shapeless and precarious mass will be stripped off. That day which you dread as the end is your birth into eternity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the shift from direct democracy to representational democracy, the printed book became an embodiment of thought for the physica...lly absent author; and so the popular art form of the popular book and the pamphlet re-presented ideas and contributed to the public space of political philosophies of the Enlightenment. Television, however, now brings forth this new kind of public space, and it calls into being this new world, not of the educated citizenry in a republic, but of the electropeasantry in the state of Entertainment. Recall how people stopped singing in pubs when they brought in the TV set, and you will appreciate the new passivity in which people stop voting for their representatives as TV takes over the electoral campaigns.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Bearing the bandages, water and sponge, Straight and swift to my wounded I go,... Where they lie on the ground after the battle brought in, Where their priceless blood reddens the grass the ground, Or to the rows of the hospital tent, or under the roof'd hospital, To the long rows of cots up and down each side I return, To each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss, An attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail, Soon to be fill'd with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill'd again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »