The confrontation between America and Europe reveals not so much a rapprochement as a distortion, an unbridgeable rift. There isn'...t just a gap between us, but a whole chasm of modernity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as he survi...ves transfixed with rapture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's own growing inne...r self.... The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I think of horror films as art, as films of confrontation. Films that make you confront aspects of your own life that are difficul...t to face. Just because you're making a horror film doesn't mean you can't make an artful film.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The "universal moments" of child rearing are in fact nothing less than a confrontation with the most basic problems of living in s...ociety: a facing through one's children of all the conflicts inherent in human relationships, a clarification of issues that were unresolved in one's own growing up. The experience of child rearing not only can strengthen one as an individual but also presents the opportunity to shape human relationships of the future.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hawthorne--like Poe--became a kind of virtuoso in the fiction of the inner life: the only novelist from New England as subtle as E...merson and Dickinson. He was able to present in the current style the extraordinary burden on the New England mind of the past, its moral introspection, its unending self-confrontation. Poe, his only equal in the "tale," was really a convert to aesthetic medievalism, an apologist for slavery, order, and hierarchy, a writer of "grotesques and arabesques" who saw the power of blackness as personal damnation and a way of practicing literary terror. It is the force of the repressed that Poe made his drawing card, the power not of the past but of the dead, as phantoms preying on unsleeping guilt. Hawthorne remained a child of Puritanism, rooted in the village, the theocracy, the rule of law, the numbing force of convention. Poe, by contrast, is forever homeless, landless, seeking a visionary home in some Platonic heaven of eternal Beauty, writing his most poignant poems out of a profound homesickness that operated as a curse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The nearest analogy to Dreiser's "personal realism" is to be found in the painter Edward Hopper, who shares Dreiser's passion for ...transcendent writers, for images of trains and roads. Despite his similar choice of "ordinary" subjects, Hopper has written that his aim "has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature." ... One feels in the awkwardness, the dreaming stillness of Hopper's figures, the same struggle to express the ultimate confrontation of men and things that one does in Dreiser's reverent descriptions of saloons, street-cars, trains, hotels, offices.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is one of the paradoxes of parenting, and often a painful paradox, that even as our children need us for love and trust, they a...lso need us for honest differing. It's not only over limits and rules...[but also] about what we represent in the way of culture, traditions, and values. We owe it to our children to let them know what we believe, and if they differ with us, we owe it to them to be honest adversaries, for it is through this honest confrontation that children can grow into adults who have a firm sense of their place in the sequence of the generations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whether we regard the Women's Liberation movement as a serious threat, a passing convulsion, or a fashionable idiocy, it is a move...ment that mounts an attack on practically everything that women value today and introduces the language and sentiments of political confrontation into the area of personal relationships.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »