Hemingway, wrote [Edmund] Wilson, was "his own worst-drawn character," by which we must assume that this hunter-bullfighter-war-lo...ving he-man failed to meet the classic specifications of a literary construct; he had no depth, not enough curious contradictions, represented not a concatenation of qualities but a single one played to the hilt. In short, he was what popular novelists (and movies, of course) give us, a type not an individ ual. It was the same way with Monroe. She had taken her basic bimbo's understanding of the world, and her instinct for leveraging it, and played her bimbohood for all it was worth, just as any popular novelist would have, and for the same reason: it represented her full understanding of the character, the best that she could do with it, and we sensed that she was not cheating or talking down to us through it, even though it read easily and did not tax us as it touched us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The reputation of generosity is to be purchased pretty cheap; it does not depend so much upon a man's general expense, as it does ...upon his giving handsomely where it is proper to give at all. A man, for instance, who should give a servant four shillings, would pass for covetous, while he who gave him a crown, would be reckoned generous; so that the difference of those two opposite characters, turns upon one shilling.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
With my desire to write he seemed in full sympathy, and in urging our early marriage he argued that my first necessity was leisure... in which to develop and to master my craft. It appeared to me that with such a man as teacher and guide I could not fail, and it was in a queer mixture of young love and vaulting ambition that I became a wife.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There was a crooked man, and he went a crooked mile, He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile:... He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse, And they all lived together in a little crooked house.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then ...come, follow me." When the young man heard this word, he went away grieving, for he had many possessions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and Shelley's poetry is not entirely sane either. The Shelley of actual life... is a vision of beauty and radiance, indeed, but availing nothing, effecting nothing. And in poetry, no less than in life, he is "a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hebraism contains no eternal realm of essence, which Greek philosophy was to fabricate, through Plato, as affording the intellectu...al deliverance from the evil of time. Such a realm of eternal essences is possible only for a detached intellect, one who, in Plato's phrase, becomes a "spectator of all time and all existence." This ideal of the philosopher as the highest human type--the theoretical intellect who from the vantage point of eternity can survey all time and existence--is altogether foreign to the Hebraic concept of the man of faith who is passionately committed to his own mortal being. Detachment was for the Hebrew an impermissible state of mind, a vice rather than a virtue; or rather it was something that Biblical man was not yet even able to conceive, since he had not reached the level of rational abstraction of the Greek. His existence was too earth-bound, too laden with oppressive images of mortality, to permit him to experience the philosopher's detachment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »