The woman poet must be either a ... sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragi...c, tortured suicide.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 »
Once you've been launched into parenthood, you'll need all your best skills, self-control, good judgment and patience. But at the ...same time there is nothing like the thrill and exhilaration that come from watching that bright, cheerful, inquisitive, creative, eccentric and even goofy child you have raised flourish and shine. That's what keeps you going, and what, in the end, makes it all worthwhile.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The field maneuvers may be different from those in Holmes's day, and the villain is more socially mobile, but since Sir Arthur we ...have not changed the three essential ingredients of the private eye. He must be a bachelor, with the bachelor's harum-scarum availability at all hours (William Powell's marriage to Myrna "Nora" Loy, a wistful concession to the family trade, fooled nobody). He must have an inconspicuous fund of curious knowledge, which in the end is always crucially relevant. He must pity the official guardians of the law. Of course, the twentieth century has grafted some interesting personality changes on the original. Holmes was an eccentric in the Victorian sense, a man with queer hobbies--cocaine was lamentable but pardonably melodramatic--whose social code was essentially that of the ruling classes. He was, in a way, the avenging squire of the underworld ready to administer a horsewhipping to the outcasts who were never privileged by birth to receive it from their fathers. Bogart is a displaced person whose present respectability is uncertain, a classless but well-contained vagabond who is not going to be questioned about where he came from or where he is going. ("I came to Casablanca for the waters." "But there are no waters in Casablanca." "I was misinformed.")LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Philosophy, astronomy, and politics were marked at zero, I remember. Botany variable, geology profound as regards the mud stains f...rom any region within fifty miles of town, chemistry eccentric, anatomy unsystematic, sensational literature and crime records unique, violin player, boxer, swordsman, lawyer, and self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is nothing real or useful that is not a seat of war. Our houses ring with laughter and personal and critical gossip, but it ...helps little. But the uncivil, unavailable man, who is a problem and a threat to society, whom it cannot let pass in silence, but must either worship or hate,--and to whom all parties feel related, both the leaders of opinion, and the obscure and eccentric,--he helps; he puts America and Europe in the wrong, and destroys the skepticism which says, "man is a doll, let us eat and drink, 'tis the best we can do," by illuminating the untried and unknown.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In a cabinet of natural history, we become sensible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard to the most unwieldy an...d eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is easy to carp at colleges, and the college, if he will wait for it, will have its own turn. Genius exists there also, but wil...l not answer a call of a committee of the House of Commons. It is rare, precious, eccentric, and darkling.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
On a very rough-and-ready basis we might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having de...termined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others. An eccentric puts ice cream on steak simply because he likes it; should a crank do so, he would endow the act with moral grandeur and straightaway denounce as sinners (or reactionaries) all who failed to follow suit.... Cranks, at their most familiar, are a sort of peevish prophets, and it's not enough that they should be in the right; others must also be in the wrong.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »