My first big mistake was made when, in a moment of weakness, I consented to learn the game; for a man who can frankly say "I do no...t play bridge" is allowed to go over in the corner and run the pianola by himself, while the poor neophyte, no matter how much he may protest that he isn't "at all a good player, in fact I'm perfectly rotten," is never believed, but dragged into a game where it is discovered, too late, that he spoke the truth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In general the newly sighted see the world as a dazzle of color-patches. They are pleased by the sensation of color, and learn qui...ckly to name the colors, but the rest of seeing is tormentingly difficult.... It oppresses them to realize, if they ever do at all, the tremendous size of the world, which they had previously conceived of as something touchingly manageable. It oppresses them to realize that they have been visible to people all along, perhaps unattractively so, without their knowledge or consent. A disheartening number of them refuse to use their new vision, continuing to go over objects with their tongues, and lapsing into apathy and despair.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You have a row of dominoes set up; you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is that it will go over very... quickly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of ...correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded women. The...re is not one which has not made her subject to man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In Europe, you do philosophy by performing discourse on another guy's text, and so Derrida will go over Heidegger, and Habermas wi...ll extend Marx's corpus; but in America you could never get away with kinky stuff like that, for you have to generate philosophy from real things--like computers or television. You need to look at Omni magazine to get a feel for this new kind of mail-order, Popular Mechanics science of mind. It's full of articles about meditation helmets and downloading the soul into computers so that when your body wears out you can live forever. What is completely missing in Europe is precisely what you will find in America: namely, an electronic Umwelt in which history is replaced with movies, education is replaced with entertainment, and nature is replaced with technology. This peculiar wedding of low kitsch and high tech generates a posthistoric world that no European literary intellectual can quite fathom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »