You will recall the proud statement made recently by a Fascist general--"We have four columns in front of Madrid and a fifth insid...e the city."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The hill farmer ... always seems to make out somehow with his corn patch, his few vegetables, his rifle, and fishing rod. This sel...f-contained economy creates in the hillman a comparative disinterest in the world's affairs, along with a disdain of lowland ways. "I don't go to question the good Lord in his wisdom," runs the phrasing attributed to a typical mountaineer, "but I jest cain't see why He put valleys in between the hills."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every European visitor to the United States is struck by the comparative rarity of what he would call a face, by the frequency of ...men and women who look like elderly babies. If he stays in the States for any length of time, he will learn that this cannot be put down to a lack of sensibility--the American feels the joys and sufferings of human life as keenly as anybody else. The only plausible explanation I can find lies in his different attitude to the past. To have a face, in the European sense of the word, it would seem that one must not only enjoy and suffer but also desire to preserve the memory of even the most humiliating and unpleasant experiences of the past.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I cannot accept the doctrine that in poetry there is a "suspension of belief." A poet must never make a statement simply because i...t is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally ...apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the same room with me, does or can possibly hold it to be compellingly true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty..., an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most personal correspondence of today consists of letters the first half of which are given over to an indexed statement of why th...e writer hasn't written before, followed by one paragraph of small talk, with the remainder devoted to reasons why it is imperative that the letter be brought to a close.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The parent is the strongest statement that the child hears regarding what it means to be alive and real. More than what we say or ...do, the way we are expresses what we think it means to be alive. So the articulate parent is less a telling than a listening individual.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »