If this bureau had a prayer for use around horse parks, it would go something like this: Lead us not among bleeding-hearts to whom... horses are cute or sweet or adorable, and deliver us from horse-lovers. Amen.... With that established, let's talk about the death of Seabiscuit the other night. It isn't mawkish to say, there was a racehorse, a horse that gave race fans as much pleasure as any that ever lived and one that will be remembered as long and as warmly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[If a woman athlete who had contracted the AIDS virus admitted that she] had been with one hundred or two hundred men, they'd call... her a slut, and the corporations would drop her like a lead balloon.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 »
We were soon at the Aboljacarmegus Falls.... It seemed as if it needed only a little familiarity, and a little more skill, to navi...gate down such falls as Niagara itself with safety. At any rate, I should not despair of such men in the rapids above Table Rock, until I saw them actually go over the falls, so cool, so collected, so fertile in resources are they. One might have thought that these were falls, and that falls were not to be waded through with impunity, like a mud-puddle. There was really danger of their losing their sublimity in losing their power to harm us. Familiarity breeds contempt.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Babe, you know how these things go, it's like a crap game. When you're hot you shoot everything, you shoot the works. Well, right ...now baby, I'm so hot I'm burning up all over.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My days are swifter than a runner; they flee away, they see no good. They go by like skiffs of reed, like an eagle swooping on the... prey.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 »
Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of w...hich history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So live that when thy summons comes to join The innumerable caravan that moves... To that mysterious realm, where each shall take His chamber in the silent halls of death, Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night, Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him and lies down to pleasant dreams.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »