Insults from an adolescent daughter are more painful, because they are seen as coming not from a child who lashes out impulsively,... who has moments of intense anger and of negative feelings which are not integrated into that large body of responses, impressions and emotions we call 'our feelings for someone,' but instead they are coming from someone who is seen to know what she does.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy.... In other countries, the business of laughin...g is left to the viewers. Here, their laughter is put on the screen, integrated into the show. It is the screen that is laughing and having a good time. You are simply left alone with your consternation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are all hostages, and we are all terrorists. This circuit has replaced that other one of masters and slaves, the dominating and... the dominated, the exploiters and the exploited.... It is worse than the one it replaces, but at least it liberates us from liberal nostalgia and the ruses of history.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An honest appraisal of the respective pleasures derived from theater and cinema, at least as to what is less intellectual and more... direct about them, forces us to admit that the delight we experience at the end of a play has a more uplifting, a nobler, one might perhaps say a more moral, effect than the satisfaction which follows a good film. We seem to come away with a better conscience. In a certain sense it is as if for the man in the audience all theater is "Corneillian." From this point of view one could say that in the best films something is missing. It is as if a certain inevitable lowering of the voltage, some mysterious aesthetic short circuit, deprived us in the cinema of a certain tension which is a definite part of theater. No matter how slight this difference it undoubtedly exists, even between the worst charity production in the theater and the most brilliant of Olivier's film adaptations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The information links are like nerves that pervade and help to animate the human organism. The sensors and monitors are analogous ...to the human senses that put us in touch with the world. Data bases correspond to memory; the information processors perform the function of human reasoning and comprehension. Once the postmodern infrastructure is reasonably integrated, it will greatly exceed human intelligence in reach, acuity, capacity, and precision.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This insight, which expresses itself by what is called Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, b...ut by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Athletes and actors--let actors stand for the set of performing artists--share much. They share the need to make gesture as fluid ...and economical as possible, to make out of a welter of choices the single, precisely right one. They share the need for impeccable and split-second timing. They share the need for thousands of hours of practice in order to train the body to become the perfect, instinctive instrument to express. Both athlete and actor, out of that congeries of emotion, choice, strategy, knowledge of terrain, mood of spectators, condition of spectators in the ensemble, secret awareness of injury or weakness, and as nearly an absolute concentration as possible so that all externalities are integrated, all distraction absorbed to the self, must be able to change the self so successfully that it changes us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
each new victim treads unfalteringly The never altered circuit of his fate,... Bringing twelve peers as witness Both to his starry rise and starry fall.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »