I used to like this town.... Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but good-hearted and peacefu...l.... Now ... we've got the big money, the sharpshooters, the percentage workers, the fast dollar boys, the hoodlums out of New York and Chicago and Detroit--and Cleveland. We've got the flash restaurants and night clubs they run, and the hotels and apartment houses they own, and the grifters and con men and female bandits that live in them. The luxury trades, the pansy decorators, the Lesbian dress designers, the riff-raff of a big hardboiled city with no more personality than a paper cup.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who... will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... there were the hangers-on, students who became involved in the movement--any movement--because it was emotionally satisfying. ...At Chicago, there are few activities in which "everybody" participates, and the lack is especially felt by the younger undergraduates. A sit-in can fuse them into a hot, steamy mass of singing, changing, touching bodies. It encourages such communal acts as sharing a blanket and eating from the same jar of peanut butter. It is not surprising that they come out of it--a few days of it, anyway--feeling that they have had something akin to a religious experience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There, burying each gloomy thought, each sad reflection in the hearse of dissipation, [we] lost the remembrance of our woes, our c...ruel misfortunes, our agonising sorrows--and graciously permitted them to glide along the stream of reviving comfort, blown by the gentle gale of new born hopes till they reposed in the bosom of oblivion--then--no! 'tis impossible! this style is too great, too sublime to be supported with proper dignity--the sublime and beautiful how charmingly blended!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
WHEREAS no provisions have, as yet, been made by the World's Columbian Exposition Commission for securing exhibits from the colore...d women of this country, or the giving of representation to them in such Fair, and WHEREAS under the present arrangement and classification of exhibits, it would be impossible for visitors to the Exposition to know and distinguish the exhibits and handiwork of the colored women from those of the Anglo- Saxons, and because of this the honor, fame and credit for all meritorious exhibits, though made by our race, would not duly be given us ... RESOLVED that for the purpose of demonstrating the progress of the colored women since emancipation and of showing to those who are yet doubters, and there are many, that the colored women ... are making rapid strides in art, science and manufacturing, and of furnishing to all information as to ... what the race has done, is doing and might do, in every department of life, that we, the colored women of Chicago request the Columbian Commission to establish an office for a colored woman whose duty it shall be to collect exhibits from the colored women of America ... [ellipses in source]LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unl...ike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To write well, to have style ... is to paint. The master faculty of style is therefore the visual memory. If a writer does not see... what he describes--countrysides and figures, movements and gestures--how could he have a style, that is originality?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A beautiful sentence is beautiful, and a beautiful flower is beautiful, but their duration is nearly the same--a day, a century. N...othing dies more quickly than a style that is not supported by the solidity of strong thought. It shrivels up like a slackened hide; it falls in a heap like a rotten vine deprived of the tree it entwines. And if someone says that the vine keeps a tree with withered roots from falling down, I would agree. Style is also a force, but its value is that much more quickly diminished when it exhausts itself in preserving from annihilation the fragility which it embraces and sustains.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »