Reality is a prison, where ... one vegetates and always will. All the rest--thought, action--is just a pastime, mental or physical.... What counts then, is to come to grips with reality. The rest can go.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O! I must tell you that I have fallen in love with a gentleman whom I have lately come acquainted with: he is about 60 or 70--has ...the misfortune to be humpbacked, crooked legged, and rather deformed in his face.--But, in sober sadness, I am delighted with the Dean of Coleraine, whose picture this is, and which I have very lately read. The piety, the zeal, the humanity, goodness and humility of this charming old man have won my heart. Ah! who will not envy him the invaluable treasure!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If he had been sent to check out Bluebeard's castle, he would have come back with a glowing report about the admirable condition o...f the cutlery.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An honest appraisal of the respective pleasures derived from theater and cinema, at least as to what is less intellectual and more... direct about them, forces us to admit that the delight we experience at the end of a play has a more uplifting, a nobler, one might perhaps say a more moral, effect than the satisfaction which follows a good film. We seem to come away with a better conscience. In a certain sense it is as if for the man in the audience all theater is "Corneillian." From this point of view one could say that in the best films something is missing. It is as if a certain inevitable lowering of the voltage, some mysterious aesthetic short circuit, deprived us in the cinema of a certain tension which is a definite part of theater. No matter how slight this difference it undoubtedly exists, even between the worst charity production in the theater and the most brilliant of Olivier's film adaptations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The night was thick and hazy When the "Piccadilly Daisy"... Carried down the crew and captain in the sea; And I think the water downed 'em; For they never, never found 'em, And I know they didn't come ashore with me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we study human language, we are approaching what some might call the 'human essence,' the distinctive qualities of mind that ...are, so far as we know, unique to man and that are inseparable from any critical phase of human existence, personal or social. Hence the fascination of this study, and, no less, its frustration. The frustration arises from the coming to grips with the core problem of human language, which I take to be this: having mastered a language, one is able to understand an indefinite number of expressions that are new to one's experience, that bear no simply physical resemblance and are in no simple way analogous to the expressions that constitute one's linguistic experience; and one is able ... to produce such expressions on an appropriate occasion, despite their novelty.... The normal use of language is, in this sense, a creative activity. This creative aspect of normal language use is one fundamental factor that distinguishes human language from any known system of animal communication.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nothing sets a person up more than having something turn out just the way it's supposed to be, like falling into a Swiss snowdrift... and seeing a big dog come up with a little cask of brandy round its neck.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The language of the game is interesting. You can think of the pauses as caesuras, breaks between the lines. As a poem the game is ...composed of a number of short lines representing the pitches. The number of lines per batter form a stanza. Then there is a space. Sometimes the stanzas become breathless, rushing full paragraphs that build rapidly on each other until the poem-inning explodes. The poem lives for this sudden blossoming out of prosodic regularity. Should someone make a computer analysis of baseball prosody, I believe that they would come up with something close to the prosody of some great American lyrical epic, Whitman's Leaves of Grass, let's say, or Doc Williams's Patterson.... The game is definitely an epic ... formed of many lyrical moments dependent on silences for their effectiveness. An unfolding story punctuated by brief emotional swellings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I believe that if we are to survive as a planet, we must teach this next generation to handle their own conflicts assertively and ...nonviolently. If in their early years our children learn to listen to all sides of the story, use their heads and then their mouths, and come up with a plan and share, then, when they become our leaders, and some of them will, they will have the tools to handle global problems and conflict.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »