And yet, and yet ... Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are obvious acts of despera...tion and secret consolation. Our fate (unlike the hell of Swedenborg or the hell of Tibetan mythology) is not frightful because it is unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and ironclad. Time is the thing I am made of. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that tears me apart, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful. The Greeks engendered the chimera, a ...monster with heads of the lion, the dragon and the goat; the theologians of the second century, the Trinity, in which the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are inextricably tied; the Chinese zoologists, the ti-yiang, a vermilion supernatural bird, endowed with six feet and four wings, but without a face or eyes; the geometers of the nineteenth century, the hypercube, a figure with four dimensions, which encloses an infinite number of cubes and has as its faces eight cubes and twenty-four squares. Hollywood has just enriched this vain museum of horrors: by means of an artistic malignity called dubbing, it proposes monsters that combine the illustrious features of Greta Garbo with the voice of Aldonza Lorenzo.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In Africa I had indeed found a sufficiently frightful kind of loneliness but the isolation of this American ant heap was even more... shattering.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The tender skin does not shrink from bayonets, the timid woman is not scared by fagots; the rack is not frightful, nor the rope ig...nominious. The poor Puritan, Antony Parsons, at the stake, tied straw on his head when the fire approached him, and said, "This is God's hat."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will, but pleasantly, and, as it were, merrily, he advances ...to his own music, alike in frightful alarms and in the tipsy mirth of universal dissoluteness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At this very moment,... the most frightful horrors are taking place in every corner of the world. People are being crushed, slashe...d, disembowelled, mangled; their dead bodies rot and their eyes decay with the rest. Screams of pain and fear go pulsing through the air at the rate of eleven hundred feet per second. After travelling for three seconds they are perfectly inaudible. These are distressing facts; but do we enjoy life any the less because of them? Most certainly we do not.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The meeting in the open of two dogs, strangers to each other, is one of the most painful, thrilling, and pregnant of all conceivab...ale encounters; it is surrounded by an atmosphere of the last canniness, presided over by a constraint for which I have no preciser name; they simply cannot pass each other, their mutual embarrassment is frightful to behold.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Of all existing forms of injustice there is none so cruel and inconsistent as is the position in which women are placed with regar...d to self-maintenance--the calm ignoring of their rights and responsibilities which has gone on for centuries. If the economic conditions are hard for men to meet, subjected as they are to the constant weeding out of the less expert and steady hands, it is evident that women, thrown upon their own resources, have a frightful struggle to endure, especially as they have always to contend against a public sentiment which discountenances their seeking industrial employment as a means of livelihood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At last, after innumerable glamorous and frightful years, mankind approaches a war which is totally predictable from beginning to ...end.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »