Though most of us don't hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, y...ou have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes. Animals that hear high frequencies better than we do--bats and dolphins, for instance--seem to see richly with their ears, hearing geographically, but for us the world becomes most densely informative, most luscious, when we take it in through our eyes. It may even be that abstract thinking evolved from our eyes' elaborate struggle to make sense of what they saw. Seventy percent of the body's sense receptors cluster in the eyes, and it is mainly through seeing the world that we appraise and understand it. Lovers close their eyes when they kiss because, if they didn't, there would be too many visual distractions to notice and analyze.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A computer does not think, it feels nothing, and what it is said to "know"--bits of information all cast in the digital mode--has ...no fringe. Nor has it a memory, only storage room. On any point called for, the answer is all or none. Vagueness, intelligent confusion, original punning on words or ideas never occur, the internal hookups being unchangeable; they were determined once for all by the true minds that made the machine and program. When plugged in, the least elaborate computer can be relied on to work to the fullest extent of its capacity; the greatest mind cannot be relied on for the simplest thing; its variability is its superiority.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Unchecked, the tourist will climb over the fence and come right into your house to take pictures of you in your habitat. Cities mi...ndful of tourists have built elaborate "tourist traps" which, luckily, work. Tourists are kept confined to these, and few escape. There is, of course, the type known as the "intrepid tourist." This one has to be watched carefully or he can become most annoying. Little wonder these are so often the target of terrorists. If there is an aspect of benign terror about the tourist, there is also a great deal of tourist in the terrorist. Terrorists travel with only one thing in mind, just like the tourist, and the specifics of places escape them both. Terrorists travel for the purpose of shooting unsuspecting foreigners, just as tourists travel for the purpose of shooting them with a camera.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, app...eared the letter A.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Elderly gentlemen, gentle in all respects, kind to animals, beloved by children, and fond of music, are found in lonely corners of... the downs, hacking at sandpits or tussocks of grass, and muttering in a blind, ungovernable fury elaborate maledictions which could not be extracted from them by robbery or murder. Men who would face torture without a word become blasphemous at the short fourteenth. It is clear that the game of golf may well be included in that category of intolerable provocations which may legally excuse or mitigate behaviour not otherwise excusable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Antifashion, a recurrent theme in the history of dress, was probably first taken up as a sign of status by the nobility, perhaps o...riginally out of necessity. Impoverished, threadbare noblemen could take pride in their lack of style while middle-class upstarts were deeply considering the cut of their coats. This strain in aristocratic style persists. The essential presumptuousness of fashion--its constant pushiness, its middle-class mobility--is one of the things that make people hate and fear it, especially very radical and conservative people. The constant dress-reform movements of the nineteenth century in England and America were attempts, in different modes, to resist and even to abolish fashion.... If elaborate fashion was the outward sign of bourgeois prosperity, antifashion had to be invented as a necessary means of indicating objections to existing social, economic, and sexual standards.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any di...fferent or more elaborate way I should be in favour of doing it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... there is ... a big aspect of play in writing novels, and making the story more and more elaborate is just more and more fun.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »