To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, ...excessive ... and impoverished.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... most Southerners of my parents' era were raised to feel that it wasn't respectable to be rich. We felt that all patriotic Sout...herners had lost everything in defense of the South, and sufficient time hadn't elapsed for respectable rebuilding of financial security in a war- impoverished region.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Vermont is a state I love. I could not look upon the peaks of Ascutney, Killington and Mansfield without being moved in a way that... no other scene could move me. It was here that I first saw the light of day, here that I received my bride. Here my dead lie buried, pillowed among the everlasting hills. I love Vermont because of her hills and valleys, her scenery and invigorating climate, but most of all, I love her because of her indomitable people. They are a race of pioneers who almost impoverished themselves for love of others. If ever the spirit of liberty should vanish from the rest of the Union, it could be restored by the generous share held by the people in this brave little State of Vermont.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This instinctive repulsion which tradespeople inspire in men of sensitive feeling is one of the very rare consolations for being s...o impoverished which are given to those of us who don't sell anything to anybody.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men found that his absorbing egotism was deadly to all other men. It resembled the torpedo, which inflicts a succession of shocks ...on any one who takes hold of it, producing spasms which contract the muscles of the hand, so that the man can not open his fingers; and the animal inflicts new and more violent shocks, until he paralyzes and kills his victim. So, this exorbitant egotist narrowed, impoverished, and absorbed the power and existence of those who served him; and the universal cry of France, and of Europe, in 1814, was, "enough of him;" "assez de Bonaparte."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Formerly they had a heaven adorned with a vast wealth of thoughts and imagery. The meaning of all that is, hung on the thread of l...ight by which it was linked to that heaven. Instead of dwelling in this world's presence, men looked beyond it, following this thread to an other-worldly presence, so to speak. The eye of the Spirit had to be forcibly turned and held fast to the things of this world; and it has taken a long time before the lucidity which only heavenly things used to have could penetrate the dullness and confusion in which the sense of worldly things was enveloped, and so make attention to the here and now as such, attention to what has been called 'experience', an interesting and valid enterprise. Now we seem to need just the opposite; sense is so fast rooted in earthly things that it requires just as much force to raise it. The Spirit shows itself as so impoverished that, like a wanderer in the desert craving for a mere mouthful of water, it seems to crave for its refreshment only the bare feeling of the divine in general. By the little which now satisfies Spirit, we can measure the extent of its loss.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Antifashion, a recurrent theme in the history of dress, was probably first taken up as a sign of status by the nobility, perhaps o...riginally out of necessity. Impoverished, threadbare noblemen could take pride in their lack of style while middle-class upstarts were deeply considering the cut of their coats. This strain in aristocratic style persists. The essential presumptuousness of fashion--its constant pushiness, its middle-class mobility--is one of the things that make people hate and fear it, especially very radical and conservative people. The constant dress-reform movements of the nineteenth century in England and America were attempts, in different modes, to resist and even to abolish fashion.... If elaborate fashion was the outward sign of bourgeois prosperity, antifashion had to be invented as a necessary means of indicating objections to existing social, economic, and sexual standards.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every ...hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Language is the only chimera whose illusory power is endless, the inexhaustibility which keeps life from being impoverished. Let m...en learn to serve language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »