Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the n...ew importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In middle life each man wrote a long elegiac work centering on the death of someone very near his heart: Tennyson's In Memoriam su...rely corresponds to Brahms' German Requiem.... At the other extreme you will no doubt think of Brahms' fiery Hungarian dances and graceful Viennese waltzes: in the work of Tennyson there are similar pieces, in broad dialect with touches of rough comedy and unbuttoned jollity, in particular "The Northern Farmer." Between these extremes, in the work of each man, lies a single masterpiece, strange but characteristic. Tennyson's Maud is what he calls a monodrama, a set of lyrics spoken by one man, telling the story of tragic love. In 1869 Brahms lost the beautiful Julie Schumann: the result was his famous Alto Rhapsody, an extended lyric, in fact a monodrama on the agonies of loneliness in a heart thirsty for love. The nineteenth century was a nationalist era, so both Brahms and Tennyson wrote pieces we should now call jingoistic: they are seldom played or read today, but they are part of the total picture. For Brahms the best known was his Triumph Song, written after the German conquests of France. For Tennyson, it was "The Charge of the Light Brigade," and other galloping and shouting lyrics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, t...he failures and botches, that are essential for the training of a mere beginner. In life, we must begin to give a public performance before we have acquired even a novice's skill; and often our moments of seeming mastery are upset by new demands, for which we have acquired no preparatory facility. Life is a score that we play at sight, not merely before we have divined the intentions of the composer, but even before we have mastered our instruments; even worse, a large part of the score has been only roughly indicated, and we must improvise the music for our particular instrument, over long passages. On these terms, the whole operation seems one of endless difficulty and frustration; and indeed, were it not for the fact that some of the passages have been played so often by our predecessors that, when we come to them, we seem to recall some of the score and can anticipate the natural sequence of the notes, we might often give up in sheer despair. The wonder is not that so much cacophony appears in our actual individual lives, but that there is any appearance of harmony and progression.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We hear a great deal of lamentation these days about writers having all taken themselves to the colleges and universities where th...ey live decorously instead of going out and getting firsthand information about life. The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails lea...ving one's ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one's life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one's "real" life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics... of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign,--is it not? of new vigor, when the extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the hands and the feet.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I don't think men respect women ... [ellipsis in original] I don't think they really respect their opinions. I don't think they re...ally respect their ability to do a job. And, therefore, when it comes to the business of hiring somebody, they're always sort of hanging back and suspicious whether the woman would actually be able to do it. Meantime, these people that are doing this to you are people that you swamped when you were going through school. I don't mean that in a bitter way. I mean this is a fact of life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), ...robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual's own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we speak the word "life," it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to t...hat fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we apply the term revolution to what happened in North America between 1776 and 1829, it has a special meaning. Normally, the w...ord describes the process by which man transforms himself from one kind of man, living in one kind of society, with one way of looking at the world, into another kind of man, another society, another conception of life.... The American case is different: it is not a question of the Old Man transforming himself into the New, but of the New Man becoming alive to the fact that he is new, that he has been transformed already without his having realized it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »