"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 business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express... feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.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 »
[I] am now struggling to enter the portals of the profession in which is locked up the passport which is to conduct me to all that... I am destined to receive in life. The entrance is steep and difficult, but my chiefest obstacles are within myself. If I knew and could master myself, all other difficulties would vanish. To overcome long-settled habits, one has almost to change "the stamp of nature"; but bad habits must be changed and good ones formed in their stead, or I shall never find the pearls I seek.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When a generation watches the young ones, their future, their responsibility, grow up, and when what they are to inherit is pitifu...l and so reduced, then the shame of it goes too deep for reasoning. No, it was not our fault that our children had to learn such hardship, had to forego so much that we, the older ones, had inherited. Our fault it was not; but we felt that it was. We were learning, we old ones, that in times when a species, a race, is under threat, drives and necessities built into the very substance of our flesh speak out in ways that we need never have known about if extremities had not come to squeeze these truths out of us. An older, a passing, generation needs to hand on goodness, something fine and high--even if it is only in potential--to their children. And if there isn't this bequest to put into their hands, then there is a bitterness and a pain that makes it hard to look into young eyes, young faces.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, my respect for my fellow-men, except as one may outweigh a million, is not being increased these days.... Such do no...t know that like the seed is the fruit, and that, in the moral world, when good seed is planted, good fruit is inevitable, and does not depend on our watering and cultivating; that when you plant, or bury, a hero in his field, a crop of heroes is sure to spring up. This is a seed of such force and vitality, that it does not ask our leave to germinate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »