I'm self-centered, inconsiderate, and what was the third adjective? Oh, yes, and I have this infantile fantasy that one day I'll a...mount to something as an actress.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As words go crying after themselves, leaving the dream Upended in a puddle somewhere... As though "dead" were just another adjective.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The beginning of sense, not to say wisdom, is to realize that 'doing an action,' as used in philosophy, is a highly abstract expre...ssion--it is a stand-in used in the place of any (or almost any?) verb with a personal subject, in the same sort of way that 'thing' is a stand-in for any ... noun substantive, and 'quality' a stand-in for the adjective.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One day the Nouns were clustered in the street. An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.... The Nouns were struck, moved, changed. The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As the adjective is lost in the sentence, So I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat--... You have enchanted me with a single kiss Which can never be undone Until the destruction of language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. C...riticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words.... Whoever writes English is involved in ...a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is difficult even to choose the adjective For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.... The great structure has become a minor house. No turban walks across the lessened floors. The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »