The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine-forest. The English mind disliked the French mind... because it was antagonistic, unreasonable, perhaps hostile, but recognized it as at least a thought. The American mind was not a thought at all; it was a convention, superficial, narrow, and ignorant; a mere cutting instrument, practical, economical, sharp and direct. The English themselves hardly conceived that their mind was either economical, sharp or direct; but the defect that most struck an American was its enormous waste in eccentricity. Americans needed and used their whole energy, and applied it with close economy; but English society was eccentric by law and for sake of the eccentricity itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Paper is soft and ink is fluid; it might be better if some pages of this chronicle could be written on chips of granite at the poi...nt of steel.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For universal love is as special an aspect as carnal love or any of the other kinds: all forms of mental and spiritual activity mu...st be practiced and encouraged equally if the whole affair is to prosper. There is no cutting corners where the life of the soul is concerned....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that cri...tical opinion is often orphaned in the present.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I feel no more like a man now than I did in long skirts, unless it be that enjoying more freedom and cutting off the fetters is to... be like a man. I suppose in that respect we are more mannish, for we know that in dress, as in all things else, we have been and are slaves, while man in dress and all things else is free.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a Restlessness springing from the consciousness of power not fully utilized, which must be present wherever there is unus...ed power of whatever kind. This is the restlessness of the germ within the seed, struggling upward and downward towards its proper life. ... it is a striving full of pain, the cutting of tender flesh by the fetters of the captive as he struggles against their pitilessness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Enormous Room seems to me to be the book that has nearest approached the mood of reckless adventure in which men will reach th...e white heat of imagination needed to fuse the soggy disjointed complexity of the industrial life about us into seething fluid of creation. There can be no more playing safe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Lost at night in an immense forest, I only have a small light to guide me. A man appears who tells me: "My friend, blow out your c...andle in order to find your way." This man is a theologian. The sea, fluid garden filled with animals and plants.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »