To anyone who still feels that there must be an identity of logical form between language and reality, I can only plead that the c...onception of language as a mirror of reality is radically mistaken. We find out soon enough that the universe is not capricious: the child who learns that fire burns and knife-edges cut knows that there are inexorable limits set upon his desires. Language must conform to the discovered regularities and irregularities of experience. But in order to do so, it is enough that it should be apt for the expression of everything that is or might be the case. To be content with less would be to be satisfied to be inarticulate; to ask for more is to desire the impossible. No roads lead from grammar to metaphysics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, t...he moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose colour, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world. In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I don't go that fast in practice, because I need the excitement of the race, the adrenalin. The others might train more and be in ...better shape, but when I'm racing, I put winning before everything else. I don't stop until the world gets gray and fuzzy around the edges.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the quilts I had found good objects--hospitable, warm, with soft edges yet resistant, with boundaries yet suggesting a continuo...us safe expanse, a field that could be bundled, a bundle that could be unfurled, portable equipment, light, washable, long-lasting, colorful, versatile, functional and ornamental, private and universal, mine and thine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You say, "It is dark." And in truth, I did place a cloud before your sun. But do you not see how the edges of the cloud are alread...y glowing and turning light.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Baseball is so modestly republican. The World Series is a continuation of the season by other means. Played in real towns, it is a...warded, democratically, to the city with the most wins, not the best caterers. And the players are built to human, yeoman scale. Footballers wear uniforms designed to make them mammoth and interchangeable, like the products of an oversized assembly line. Baseball outfits are meant to betray the real body underneath. In baseball's perfectly American balance of anarchy and order, uniforms are worn. But republican flannels, for God's sake, not the pads and helmets of a Nixonian Swiss guard.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The essence of the physicality of the most famous blonde in the world is a wholesome eroticism blurred a little round the edges by... the fact she is not quite sure what eroticism is. This gives her her tentative luminosity and what makes her, somehow, always more like her own image in the mirror than she is like herself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of trut...h. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me, is to know how shallow it is.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.... In time the curtain-edges will grow light. Till then I see what's really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »