The confrontation between America and Europe reveals not so much a rapprochement as a distortion, an unbridgeable rift. There isn'...t just a gap between us, but a whole chasm of modernity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not enough for theory to describe and analyse, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes. In order to do this ...theory must partake of and become the acceleration of this logic. It must tear itself from all referents and take pride only in the future. Theory must operate on time at the cost of a deliberate distortion of present reality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The difference between a photograph and even the most realistic painting--say, one of Courbet's landscapes--is that in the latter ...there has been selection, emphasis and some discreet distortion. The painter's deep instinctive feeling for mass and force has rearranged everything.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man's memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiograp...hy is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The American novel tends to rest in contradictions and among extreme ranges of experience. When it attempts to resolve contradicti...ons, it does so in oblique, morally equivocal ways. As a general rule, it does so either in melodramatic actions or in pastoral idylls, although intermixed with both one may find the stirring instabilities of "American humor." These qualities constitute the uniqueness of that branch of the novelistic tradi tion which has flourished in this country. They help to account for the strong element of "romance" in the American "novel." By contrast, the English novel has followed a middle way. It is notable for its great practical sanity, its powerful, engrossing composition of wide ranges of experience into a moral centrality and equability of judgment. Oddity, distortion of personality, dislocations of normal life, recklessness of behavior--these the English novel has included. Yet the profound poetry of disorder we find in the American novel is missing, with rare exceptions, from the English.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We must believe that "emotion recollected in tranquillity" is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor... without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not "recollected" and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is "tranquil" only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This is our fate: eight hundred years' disaster, crazily tangled like the Book of Kells:... the dream's distortion and the land's division, the midnight raiders and the prison cells.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I sometimes compare press officers to riflemen on the Somme--mowing down wave upon wave of distortion, taking out rank upon rank o...f supposition, deduction and gossip.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Bias entails a value-directed departure from accuracy, objectivity, and balance--not just a distorted presentation of facts. If, f...or example, a reporter fails to notice that the computer has swallowed a crucial paragraph in a news story, and the story is published without the paragraph, the inevitable distortion results from error, not bias. For a story to be biased, the distorted information it contains must be causally connected to the writer's or editor's values.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and of...ten a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »