Words convey the mental treasures of one period to the generations that follow; and laden with this, their precious freight, they ...sail safely across gulfs of time in which empires have suffered shipwreck and the languages of common life have sunk into oblivion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Often, while contemplating works of art, not in their easily perceptible materiality, in the too-clear hieroglyphs of their contou...rs or the obvious meaning of their subject, but in the soul with which they are endowed, in the atmospheric impression that they convey, in the spiritual light or darkness which they pour into our souls, I have felt entering into me a kind of vision of the childhood of their creators. Some little sorrow, some small pleasure of the child, inordinately inflated by an exquisite sensibility, become later on in the adult man, even without his knowing it, the basis of a work of art.... Genius is nothing but childhood clearly formulated, newly endowed with virile and powerful means of self-expression.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[Convey to your child] that you understand how hard it can be to lose a friend, that under the circumstances feeling sad, angry, h...urt or rejected is perfectly normal, that the friendship had some good things and some bad things to it and that neither aspect should be overlooked. . . . Children should be helped to realize that in time they'll find other friends--but they mustn't expect a new friend to "replace" a former one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a reportorial quality in Hemingway's work that is absent from Fitzgerald's fiction. Hemingway's technique--in his early w...ork, at least--was to let the observed detail convey emotion with no authorial analysis. Fitzgerald was more concerned with evoking and analyzing the feeling of an experience than with recording detail. As he advised his daughter, "But when in a freak moment you will want to give the low-down, not the scandal, not the merely reported but the profound essence of what happened at a prom or after it, perhaps that honesty will come to you--and then you will understand how it is possible to make even a forlorn Laplander feel the importance of a trip to Cartier's!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am sure my bones would not rest in an English grave, or my clay mix with the earth of that country. I believe the thought would ...drive me mad on my death-bed could I suppose that any of my friends would be base enough to convey my carcass back to her soil. I would not even feed her worms if I could help it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down pato...is which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar- room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a commonplace that all religion expresses itself in mythological or metaphorical terms; it says one thing and means another;... it uses imagery to convey truth. But the crucial fact about religion is not that it is metaphor, but that it is unconscious metaphor. No one can express any thought without using metaphors, but this does not reduce all philosophy and science to religion, because the scientist knows that his metaphors are merely metaphors and that the truth is something other than the imagery by which it is expressed, whereas in religion the truth and the imagery are identified. To repeat the Creed as a religious act it is necessary not to add "All this I believe in a symbolical or figurative sense": to make that addition is to convert religion into philosophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unl...ike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Politics is not an end, but a means. It is not a product, but a process. It is the art of government. Like other values it has its... counterfeits. So much emphasis has been placed upon the false that the significance of the true has been obscured and politics has come to convey the meaning of crafty and cunning selfishness, instead of candid and sincere service.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Cat-lovers will no doubt point out that the elegance and dignity of cats are the consequence of their sojourn in the temples of th...e gods, where their attitudes and movements were regarded as divine prognostications. Be that as it may, it is obvious that the cat's wealth of expressions make it an ideal candidate for such a role. Unlike the dog, which either wags its tail or does not wag its tail, the cat possesses a wide range of means to convey its emotions: It arches its back, makes its fur stand on end, meows, rubs itself against furniture and against humans, purrs, lashes its tail, spits, and hisses. The priests of Bacht, therefore, had ample material for interpretation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »