I can't earn my own living. I could never make anything turn into money. It's like making fires. A careful assortment of paper, sh...avings, faggots and kindling nicely tipped with pitch will never light for me. I have never been present when a cigarette butt, extinct, thrown into a damp and isolated spot, started a conflagration in the California woods.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When the object is perceived as particular and unique and not merely the member of a family, when it appears independent of any ge...neral notion and detached from the sanity of a cause, isolated and inexplicable in the light of ignorance, then and only then may it be a source of enchantment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An isolated outbreak of virginity ... is a rash on the face of society. It arouses only pity from the married, and embarrassment f...rom the single.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The improved American highway system ... isolated the American-in-transit. On his speedway ... he had no contact with the towns wh...ich he by-passed. If he stopped for food or gas, he was served no local fare or local fuel, but had one of Howard Johnson's nationally branded ice cream flavors, and so many gallons of Exxon. This vast ocean of superhighways was nearly as free of culture as the sea traversed by the Mayflower Pilgrims.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: i...t is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The sick man is taken away by the institution that takes charge not of the individual, but of his illness, an isolated object tran...sformed or eliminated by technicians devoted to the defense of health the way others are attached to the defense of law and order or tidiness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The energetic action of the times develops individualism, and the religious appear isolated. I esteem this a step in the right dir...ection. Heaven deals with us on no representative system. Souls are not saved in bundles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We must learn to differentiate between fears and anxieties. Fears are states of apprehension which focus on isolated and recogniza...ble dangers so that they may be judiciously appraised and realistically countered. Anxieties are diffuse states of tension (caused by a loss of mutual regulation and a consequent upset in libidinal and aggressive controls) which magnify and even cause the illusion of an outer danger, without pointing to appropriate avenues of defense or mastery. These two forms of apprehension obviously often occur together, and we can insist on a strict separation only for the sake of the present argument. If, in an economic depression, a man is afraid that he may lose his money, his fear may be justified. But if the idea of having to live on an income only ten times, instead of twenty-five times as large as that of his average fellow-citizen causes him to lose his nerve and to commit suicide, then we must consult our clinical formulas.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When needs and means become abstract in quality, abstraction is also a character of the reciprocal relation of individuals to one ...another. This abstract character, universality, is the character of being recognized and is the moment which makes concrete, i.e. social, the isolated and abstract needs and their ways and means of satisfaction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »