Hell is out of fashion--institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the ...gaps between the bars are the sutures of one's own skull.... A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption, even if this is never achieved, the dungeons of an architecture of grace whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells of the present century are reached with one-way tickets, marked Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final than the grave.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Life's an awfully lonesome affair.... You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are m...ore alone while living than even going and coming.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Southern States are uneasy at the prospect of [Abraham] Lincoln's election today. The ultra South threatens disunion, and it n...ow looks as if South Carolina and possibly two or three others would go out of the Union. Will they? And if so, what is to be the result? Will other slave States gradually be drawn after them, or will the conservative States draw back into the Union or hold in the Union the ultra States? I think the latter. But at all events, I feel as if the time had come to test this question. If the threats are meant, then it is time the Union was dissolved or the traitors crushed out. I hope Lincoln goes in.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Grief that is dazed and speechless is out of fashion: the modern woman mourns her husband loudly and tells you the whole story of ...his death, which distresses her so much that she forgets not the slightest detail about it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The pickings are pretty slim when you have to play the part of a housewife who doesn't go out of her apartment because she's afrai...d she's going to get mugged, or a woman who turns into her brother, who is a murderer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I go out of my way, but rather by license than carelessness.... It is the inattentive reader who loses my subject, not I. Som...e word about it will always be found off in a corner, which will not fail to be sufficient, though it takes little room.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The comic imagination deals in miraculous transformations and instantaneous casting-off of burdens and sufferings. It releases sud...den floods of feelings and allows the purging of enmity in play. The comic sense can cause a sensation of wholeness and integrity of being, though one that is almost brief and passing. When we are in a festive mood and laughing, we seem to go out of our normally anxious, reflective selves into a different phase of being, and the comic flow within us dissolves our sense of limitation. Time stands still, and we feel ourselves to be the center of life. Mirth so intensifies the moment that it could be described as sanctifying life by the sheer unself-conscious vitality that it stimulates within us. No wonder, then, that the act of laughter and the surge of comic joy in a death-haunted, misery-prone creature could be, and sometimes has been, seen and felt as a natural intrusion of the miraculous into the self--as, that is, a religious experience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Perseverance, dear my lord, Keeps honor bright; to have done is to hang... Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail, In monumental mockery.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you do not remember while you are writing, it may seem confused to others but actually it is clear and eventually that clarity ...will be clear, that is what a master-piece is, but if you remember while you are writing it will seem clear at the time to any one but the clarity will go out of it that is what a master- piece is not.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are, indeed, severe things in it which no man should read aloud more than once. "Seek first the kingdom of heaven." "Lay not... up for yourselves treasures on earth." "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven." "For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" Think of this, Yankees! "Verily, I say unto you, if ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place, and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible to you." Think of repeating these things to a New England audience! thirdly, fourthly, fifteenthly, till there are three barrels of sermons! who, without cant, can read them aloud? Who, without cant, can hear them, and not go out of the meeting-house? They never were read, they never were heard. Let but one of these sentences be rightly read, from any pulpit in the land, and there would not be left one stone of that meeting-house upon another.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »