"The only one who has ever been really mysterious." (Joan Crawford); "Her mystery was as thick as a London fog." (Tallulah Bankhea...d); "In a quick turn of her head, in a frank look, a boyish pout, in that proud glance from lowered lids, so pitying and yet so distant that in others it would be supercilious, in all those expressions of conscious beauty, which when imitated become clumsy, or arrogant, or ridiculous, there is a manifestation of what Hollywood cannot destroy. In the presence of this mystery all that is second-rate can be forgotten." (Cecil Beaton)LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind's eye only, fade out in san...d.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Bible worship, though at its best it may achieve sublimity by keeping its head in the skies, may also make itself both ridiculous ...and dangerous by having its feet off the ground.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable ...to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time--and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
On the whole, Chaucer impresses us as greater than his reputation, and not a little like Homer and Shakespeare, for he would have ...held up his head in their company.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There were several canal-boats ... passing through the locks, for which we waited. In the forward part of one stood a brawny New H...ampshire man, leaning on his pole, bareheaded and in shirt and trousers only, a rude Apollo of a man, coming down from "that vast uplandish country" to the main; of nameless age, with flaxen hair and vigorous, weather-bleached countenance, in whose wrinkles the sun still lodged, as little touched by the heats and frosts and withering cares of life as a maple of the mountain; an undressed, unkempt, uncivil man, with whom we parlayed awhile, and parted not without a sincere interest in one another. His humanity was genuine and instinctive, and his rudeness only a manner. He inquired, just as we were passing out of earshot, if we had killed anything, and we shouted after him that we had shot a buoy, and could see him for a long while scratching his head in vain to know if he had heard aright.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This sand seemed to us the connecting link between land and water. It was a kind of water on which you could walk, and you could s...ee the ripple-marks on its surface, produced by the winds, precisely like those at the bottom of a brook or lake. We had read that Mussulmans are permitted by the Koran to perform their ablutions in sand when they cannot get water, a necessary indulgence in Arabia, and we now understand the propriety of this provision.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are ... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and th...ink that you are in paradise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »