Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirro...rs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nay, if there's room for poets in this world A little overgrown (I think there is),... Their sole work is to represent the age, Their age, not Charlemagne's,--this live, throbbing age. That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires, And spends more passion, more heroic heat, Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms, Than Roland with his knights.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the first place, sculpture is dependent on certain lights, namely those from above, while a picture carries everywhere with it ...its own light and shade; light and shade therefore are essential to sculpture. In this respect, the sculptor is aided by the nature of the relief, which produces these of its own accord, but the painter artificially creates them by art in places where nature would normally do the like. The sculptor cannot render the difference in the varying natures of the colors of objects; painting does not fail to do so in any particular. The lines of perspective of sculptors do not seem in any way true; those of painters may appear to extend a hundred miles beyond the work itself. The effects of aerial perspective are outside the scope of sculptors' work; they can neither represent transparent bodies nor luminous bodies nor angles of reflection nor shining bodies such as mirrors and like things of glittering surface, nor mists, nor dull weather, nor an infinite number of things which I forbear to mention lest they should prove wearisome.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Self-revelation is a cruel process. The real picture, the real "you" never emerges. Looking for it is as bewildering as trying to ...know how you really look. Ten different mirrors show you ten different faces.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our age is very cheap and intelligible. Unroof any house, and you shall find it. The well-being consists in having a sufficiency o...f coffee and toast, with a daily newspaper; a well glazed parlor, with marbles, mirrors and centre-table; and the excitement of a few parties and a few rides in a year.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like a...ctors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying--only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the motion-picture theater, the screen at rest is a neutral, shadowy blank; at rest, the fish-eye lens of the TV screen mirrors... the room over which it presides. In both, the images are luminous, lighted as though from within, but the motion-picture images hover on or just in front of the surface of the screen. The viewer moves toward inclusion; no need for those movie-palace stunts, those three-dimensional experiments when, bicolored glasses in place, we ducked the baseball flung at us or were frozen in our seats by the locomotive that roared out of the screen and over our heads. The TV image, by contrast, recedes into its box and includes us out.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Among all the emotions, the rich have the least talent for love. It is possible to love one's dog, dress or duck-shooting hat, but... a human being presents a more difficult problem. The rich might wish to experience feelings of affection, but it is almost impossible to chip away the enamel of their narcissism. They take up all the space in all the mirrors in the house. Their children, who represent the most present and therefore the most annoying claim on their attention, usually receive the brunt of their irritation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »