A language is therefore a horizon, and style a vertical dimension, which together map out for the writer a Nature, since he does n...ot choose either. The language functions negatively, as the initial limit of the possible, style is a Necessity which binds the writer's humour to his form of expression. In the former, he finds a familiar History, in the latter, a familiar personal past. In both cases he deals with a Nature, that is, a familiar repertory of gestures, a gestuary, as it were, in which the energy expended is purely operative, serving here to enumerate, there to transform, but never to appraise or signify a choice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into... a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. ... Death does away with time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I was continuing to shrink. To become, what? The infinitesimal? What was I? Still a human being, or was I the man of the future?...... So close, the infinitesimal and the infinite, but suddenly I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet, like the closing of a gigantic circle. I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp the heavens. The universe, worlds beyond number, God's silver tapestry spread across the night. And in that moment I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite. I had thought in terms of man's own limited dimension. I had presumed upon nature. That existence begins and ends is man's conception, not nature's, and I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears melted away and in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation--it had to mean something. And then I meant something, too. Yes, smaller than the smallest--I meant something, too. To God, there is no zero. I still exist. Even athletes need to sleep.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I think no virtue goes with size; The reason of all cowardice... Is, that men are overgrown, And, to be valiant, must come down To the titmouse dimension.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By intervening in the Vietnamese struggle the United States was attempting to fit its global strategies into a world of hillocks a...nd hamlets, to reduce its majestic concerns for the containment of communism and the security of the Free World to a dimension where governments rose and fell as a result of arguments between two colonels' wives.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world b...egan to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we are ever to construct a feminist movement that is not based on the premise that men and women are always at war with one ano...ther, then we must be willing to acknowledge the appropriateness of complex critical responses to writing by men even if it is sexist. Clearly women can learn from writers whose work is sexist, even be inspired by it, because sexism may be simply one dimension of that work. Concurrently fiercely critiquing the sexism does not mean that one does not value the work.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and mere...ly "understandable" world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account), we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Pornography is not objectionable simply because it arouses sexual desire or lust or prurience in the mind of the reader or spectat...or; this is a silly Victorian notion. A great many nonpornographic works--including some parts of the Bible--excite sexual desire very successfully. What is distinctive about pornography is that, in the words of D.H. Lawrence, it attempts "to do dirt on [sex].... [It is an] insult to a vital human relationship." In other words, pornography differs from erotic art in that its whole purpose is to treat human beings obscenely, to deprive human beings of their specifically human dimension. That is what obscenity is all about. It is light years removed from any kind of carefree sensuality--there is no continuum between Fielding's Tom Jones and the Marquis de Sade's Justine. These works have quite opposite intentions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »