Children don't read to find their identity, to free themselves from guilt, to quench the thirst for rebellion or to get rid of ali...enation. They have no use for psychology.... They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff.... When a book is boring, they yawn openly. They don't expect their writer to redeem humanity, but leave to adults such childish illusions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The time is perhaps not altogether too green for the vile suggestion that art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in t...he clear and does not make clear, and more than the light of day (or night) makes the subsolar, -lunar, and -stellar excrement. Art is the sun, moon, and stars of the mind, the whole mind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ah, the truth, what a thing it is! I sacrifice so much for it, with people: I forego, for truth's sake, discretion, loyalty, diplo...macy, tact, polite manners, elegance, grace, poise, balance, good taste, conformity, image-role, fashionableness, polish, confidences, promises, ambition, consistency, identity, clarity, comprehensibleness, good will, hypocrisy, and lots of other things--amass sacrifice, at truth's altar. God! is truth worth it? I hope it is. It better be, in fact.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content ... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from lan...guage we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Eighteen might look at thirty-four through a rising mist of adolescence; but twenty-two would see thirty-eight with discerning cla...rity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How to attain sufficient clarity of thought to meet the terrifying issues now facing us, before it is too late, is ... important. ...Of one thing I feel reasonably sure: we can't stop to discuss whether the table has or hasn't legs when the house is burning down over our heads. Nor do the classics per se seem to furnish the kind of education which fits people to cope with a fast-changing civilization.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The war was a mirror; it reflected man's every virtue and every vice, and if you looked closely, like an artist at his drawings, i...t showed up both with unusual clarity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Rock 'n' roll is a combination of good ideas dried up by fads, terrible junk, hideous failings in taste and judgment, gullibility ...and manipulation, moments of unbelievable clarity and invention, pleasure, fun, vulgarity, excess, novelty and utter enervation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »