I ... like being successful. I somehow always knew that I would succeed. I had a great sense of destiny from the time I was very y...oung.... When I was only about five or six years old, I was standing with my mother in the kitchen at home in Long Beach. I told her flat out that when I grew up I was going to be the best at something. She just smiled and kept peeling potatoes or whatever it was she was doing. She said, "Yes, dear; yes, of course, dear," as if I had simply said that I was going to my room or going to eat an apple ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mrs. Coley's three-flat brick Isn't here any more.... All done with seeing her fat little form Burst out of the basement door....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Speech is after all only a system of gestures, having the peculiarity that each gesture produces a characteristic sound, so that i...t can be perceived through the ear as well as through the eye. Listening to a speaker instead of looking at him tends to make us think of speech as essentially a system of sounds; but it is not; essentially it is a system of gestures made with the lungs and larynx, and the cavities of the mouth and nose. We get still farther away from the fundamental facts about speech when we think of it as something that can be written and read, forgetting that what writing, in our clumsy notations, can represent is only a small part of the spoken sound, where pitch and stress, tempo and rhythm, are almost entirely ignored. But even a writer or reader, unless the words are to fall flat or meaningless, must speak them soundlessly to himself. The written or printed book is only a series of hints, as elliptical as the neumes of Byzantine music, from which the reader thus works out for himself the speech-gestures which alone have the gift of expression.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge. Some of us have ven...tured out nevertheless, and so far we have not fallen off. It is my faith, my feminist faith, that we will not.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A picture wants solidity, a statue wants colour. But we see the want of colour as a palpably glaring defect, and we do not see the... want of solidity, the effects of which to the spectator are supplied by light and shadow. A picture is as perfect an imitation of nature as is conveyed by a looking-glass; which is all that the eye can require, for it is all it can take in for the time being. A fine picture resembles a real living man; the finest statue in the world can only resemble a man turned to stone. The one is an image, the other a cold abstraction of nature. It leaves out half the visible impression.... It appears to me that sculpture, though not proper to express health or life or motion, accords admirably with the repose of the tomb; and that it cannot be better employed than in arresting the fleeting dust in imperishable forms, and in embodying a lifeless shadow. Painting, on the contrary, from what I have seen of it in Catholic countries, seems to be out of its place on the walls of churches; it has a flat and flimsy effect contrasted with the solidity of the building, and its rich flaunting colours harmonize but ill with solemnity of the surrounding scene.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The allurement that women hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: they are enormously... dangerous and hence enormously fascinating. To the average man, doomed to some banal drudgery all his life long, they offer the only grand hazard that he ever encounters. Take them away, and his existence would be as flat and secure as that of a moo-cow.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Out in Hollywood, where the streets are paved with Goldwyn, the word "sophisticate" means, very simply, "obscene." A sophisticated... story is a dirty story. Some of that meaning was wafted eastward and got itself mixed up into the present definition. So that a "sophisticate" means: one who dwells in a tower made of a DuPont substitute for ivory and holds a glass of flat champagne in one hand and an album of dirty post cards in the other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Out of the darkness where Philomela sat, Her fairy numbers issued. What then ailed me?... My ears are called capacious but they failed me, Her classics registered a little flat! I rose, and venomously spat.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »