I have been required to put roots and shoots and little stems and tendrils together much as their author did, to wander discourage...d and confused as Hansel and Gretel through a dark wood of witches, to strike the hot right way suddenly, but just as suddenly to mire, to drag, to speed, to shout Urreek! to fall asleep, to submit to revelations, certainly to curl a lip, to doubt, unnose a disdainful snort, snick a superior snicker, curse, and then at some point not very pleasantly to realize that the game I'm playing is the game of creation itself, because Tender Buttons is above all a book of kits like those from which harpsichords or paper planes or model bottle boats are fashioned, with intricacy no objection, patience a demand, unreadable plans a pleasure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No one makes mistakes. No one runs away Any more. I bite my lip and... Turn to you. Maybe now you understand. The feeling is a jewel like a pearl.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everything is spoilt by use: Where's the cheek that doth not fade,... Too much gazed at? Where's the maid Whose lip mature is ever new? Where's the eye, however, blue, Doth not weary? Where's the face One would meet in every place?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Byron and Elvis Presley look alike, especially in strong-nosed Greek profile. In Glenarvon, a roman a clef about her affair with B...yron, Caroline Lamb says of her heroine's first glimpse of him, "The proud curl of the upper lip expressed haughtiness and bitter contempt." Presley's sneer was so emblematic that he joked about it. In a 1968 television special, he twitched his mouth and murmured, to audience laughter, "I've got something on my lip." The Romantic curling lip is aristocratic disdain: Presley is still called "the King," testimony to the ritual needs of a democratic populace. As revolutionary sexual personae, Byron and Presley had early and late styles: brooding menace, then urbane magnanimity. Their everyday manners were manly and gentle. Presley had a captivating soft-spoken charm. The Byronic hero, says Peter Thorslev, is "invariably courteous toward women." Byron and Presley were world-shapers, conduits of titanic force, yet they were deeply emotional and sentimental in a feminine sense.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You know how Utamaro's beauties sought The end of love in their all-speaking braids.... Alas! Have all the barbers lived in vain That not one curl in nature has survived?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Do you know the balancings of the clouds, the wondrous works of the one whose knowledge is perfect, you whose garments are hot whe...n the earth is still because of the south wind? Can you, like him, spread out the skies, hard as a molten mirror?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When he bit that bud of her lower lip,... she started, shook a finger, arched her brow, and hissed, "Leave me alone, you fool," her eyes narrowing into slits. Whoever kisses such a haughty woman wins the drink of immortality. Those idiot gods churned the ocean for nothing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching, yet another Black man hanging on a tree. One more woman ambus...hed and raped. A Black boy whipped and maimed. It was hounds on the trail of a man running through slimy swamps.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »