Here lies a man who was killed by lightning; He died when his prospects seemed to be brightening.... He might have cut a flash in this world of trouble, But the flash cut him, and he lies in the stubble.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A line in long array, where they wind betwixt green islands; They take a serpentine course--their arms flash in the sun--hark... to the musical clank;LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Who will join in the march to the Rocky Mountains with me, a sort of high-pressure-double-cylinder-go-it-ahead-forty-wildcats- tea...rin' sort of a feller?... Git out of this warming-pan, ye holly-hocks, and go out to the West where you may be seen.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I used to like this town.... Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but good-hearted and peacefu...l.... Now ... we've got the big money, the sharpshooters, the percentage workers, the fast dollar boys, the hoodlums out of New York and Chicago and Detroit--and Cleveland. We've got the flash restaurants and night clubs they run, and the hotels and apartment houses they own, and the grifters and con men and female bandits that live in them. The luxury trades, the pansy decorators, the Lesbian dress designers, the riff-raff of a big hardboiled city with no more personality than a paper cup.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I can't accept "our nervous age," since mankind has been nervous during every age. Whoever fears nervousness should turn into a st...urgeon or smelt; if a sturgeon makes a stupid mistake, it can only be one: to end up on a hook, and then in a pan in a pastry shell.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My life is superficial, takes no root in the deep world; I ask, When shall I die, and be relieved of the responsibility of seeing ...a Universe which I do not use? I wish to exchange this flash-of-lightning faith for continuous daylight, this fever-glow for a benign climate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A 'spasm band' is a miscellaneous collection of a soap box, tin cans, pan tops, nails, drumsticks, and little Negro boys. When mix...ed in the proper proportions this results in the wildest shuffle dancing, accompanied by a bumping rhythm.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What the hell is nostalgia doing in a science-fiction film? With the whole universe and all the future to play in, Lucas took his ...marvelous toys and crawled under the fringed cloth on the parlor table, back into a nice safe hideyhole, along with Flash Gordon and the Cowardly Lion and Luck Skywalker and the Flying Aces and the Hitler Jugend. If there's a message there, I don't think I want to hear it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Poetry is the heaven of the working reason. Poetry is a divination of the spiritual in the things of sense--which expresses itself... in the things of sense, and in a delight of sense. Metaphysics also pursues a spiritual prey, but metaphysics is engaged in abstract knowledge, while poetry quickens art. Metaphysics snatches at the spiritual in an idea, by the most abstract intellection; poetry reaches it in the flesh, by the very point of the sense sharpened through intelligence. Metaphysics enjoys its possession only in the retreats of the eternal regions, while poetry finds its own at every crossroad in the wanderings of the contingent and the singular. The more real the reality, the superreal (I would not give up this word to the Surrealists), the superreal which both seek, metaphysics must attain in the nature of things, while it suffices to poetry to touch it in any sign whatsoever. Metaphysics gives chase to essences and definitions, poetry to any flash of existence glittering by the way, and any reflection of an invisible order.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Quite different from them [abstractions of animal nature] in origin and intent, but confused with them in form, are those other co...mpanions of Dionysus, Pan and his children. Home-spun dream of simple people, and like them in the uneventful tenour of his existence, he has almost no story; he is but a presence; the spiritual form of Arcadia, and the ways of human life there; the reflexion, in sacred image or ideal, of its flocks, and orchards, and wild honey; the dangers of its hunters; its weariness in noonday heat; its children, agile as the goats they tend, who run, in their picturesque rags, across the solitary wanderer's path, to startle him, in the unfamiliar upper places; its one adornment and solace being the dance to the homely shepherd's pipe, cut by Pan first from the sedges of the brook Molpeia.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »