Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all ci...vil countries in a thousand years have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover in their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The studious class are their own victims: they are thin and pale, their feet are cold, their heads are hot, the night is without s...leep, the day a fear of interruption,--pallor, squalor, hunger, and egotism. If you come near them, and see what conceits they entertain,--they are abstractionists, and spend their days and nights in dreaming some dream; in expecting the homage of society to some precious scheme built on a truth, but destitute of proportion in its presentment, of justness in its application, and of all energy of will in the schemer to embody and vitalize it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"... We need the interruption of the night To ease attention off when overtight,... To break our logic in too long a flight, And ask us if our premises are right."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The mind is refrigerated by interruption; the thoughts are diverted from the principal subject; the reader is weary, he suspects n...ot why; and at last throws away the book, which he has too diligently studied.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One fee...ls one's being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness--the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great silent movies revolve around the body and the personality of its owner; the great sound comedies revolve about structure... and style--what happens, how it happens, and the way those happenings are depicted. Film comedy, as well as film art in general, was born from delight in physical movement. The essence of early filmmaking was to take some object (animate or inanimate) and simply watch it move.... The sound comedy is far more literary. Given the opportunity to use the essential tool of literature, words, as an intrinsic part of the film's conception, the filmmaker did not hesitate to do so. In silent films, the use of words in titles was intrusive, a deliberate interruption of the cinematic medium and a substitution of the literary one. We stop looking and start reading. But the sound film provided the means to watch the action and listen to the words at the same time. Whereas the silent performer was a physical being,... the sound performer was both physical and intellectual at once.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toi...let.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only p...air were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are few things more difficult than to appraise the work of a man suddenly dead in his youth; to disentangle "promise" from a...chievement; to save him from that sentimentalizing which confuses the tragedy of the interruption with the merit of the work actually performed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sorrow has the fortunate peculiarity that it preys upon itself. It dies of starvation. Since it is essentially an interruption of ...habits, it can be replaced by new habits. Constituting, as it does, a void, it is soon filled up by a real "horror vacui."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »