Every living language, like the perspiring bodies of living creatures, is in perpetual motion and alteration; some words go off, a...nd become obsolete; others are taken in, and by degrees grow into common use; or the same word is inverted to a new sense or notion, which in tract of time makes an observable change in the air and features of a language, as age makes in the lines and mien of a face.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are people who can write their memoirs with a reasonable amount of honesty, and there are people who simply cannot take them...selves seriously enough. I think I might be the first to admit that the sort of reticence which prevents a man from exploiting his own personality is really an inverted sort of egotism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The novelist, unlike many of his colleagues, makes up a number of word-masses roughly describing himself (roughly: niceties shall ...come later), gives them names and sex, assigns them plausible gestures, and causes them to speak by the use of inverted commas, and perhaps to behave consistently.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ulysses ... is a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, an inverted Victorianism, an attempt to make crossness and dirt su...cceed where sweetness and light failed, a simplification of the human character in the interests of Hell.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The structure was designed by an old sea captain who believed that the world would end in a flood. He built a home in the traditio...nal shape of the Ark, inverted, with the roof forming the hull of the proposed vessel. The builder expected that the deluge would cause the house to topple and then reverse itself, floating away on its roof until it should land on some new Ararat.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A tragic or comic plot is not a straight line: it is a parabola following the shapes of the mouths on the conventional masks. Come...dy has a U-shaped plot, with the action sinking into deep and often potentially tragic complications, and then suddenly turning upward into a happy ending. Tragedy has an inverted U, with the action rising in crisis to a peripety and then plunging downward to a catastrophe through a series of recognitions, usually of the inevitable consequences of previous acts. But in both cases what is recognized is seldom anything new; it is something which has been there all along, and which, by its reappearance or manifestation, brings the end into line with the beginning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You can be slum-born and slum-bred and still achieve something worth while; but it is a stupid inverted snobbishness to be proud o...f it. If one had a right to be proud of anything, it would be of a continued decent tradition back of one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In a man's letters you know, Madam, his soul lies naked, his letters are only the mirror of his breast, whatever passes within him... is shown undisguised in its natural process. Nothing is inverted, nothing distorted, you see systems in their elements, you discover actions in their motives.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And that inverted Bowl we call The Sky, Whereunder crawling coop't we live and die,... Lift not thy hands to It for help--for It Rolls impotently on as Thou or I.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Can they never tell What is dragging them back, and how it will end? Not at night?... Not when the strangers come? Never, throughout The whole hideous inverted childhood? Well, We shall find out.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »