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 »
A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in ...the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.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 »
Then cut down the trees when lumber grown, And there's your pristine earth all freed... From lovely blooming but wasteful weed And ready again for the grass to own.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »