I always get back to the question, is it really necessary that men should consume so much of their bodily and mental energies in t...he machinery of civilised life? The world seems to me to do much of its toil for that which is not in any sense bread. Again, does not the latent feeling that much of their striving is to no purpose tend to infuse large quantities of sham into men's work?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give f...orth its spark.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, w...ho would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history." History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Any owner of cats will know of what I speak. Cats come at dawn to sit on your bed. They may not nip your nose or inhale your breat...h or make a sound. They simply sit there and stare at you until you open one eyelid and spy them there about to drop dead for need of feeding. So it is with ideas. They come silently in the hour of trying to wake up and remember my name. The notions and fancies sit on the edge of my wits, whisper in my ears and then, if I don't rouse, give more than cats give: a good knock in the head, which gets me out and down to my typewriter before the ideas flee or die or both. In any event, I make the ideas come to me. I do not go to them. I provoke their patience by pretending disregard. This infuriates the latent creature until it is almost raving to be born and once born, nourished.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The middle years of parenthood are characterized by ambiguity. Our kids are no longer helpless, but neither are they independent. ...We are still active parents but we have more time now to concentrate on our personal needs. Our children's world has expanded. It is not enclosed within a kind of magic dotted line drawn by us. Although we are still the most important adults in their lives, we are no longer the only significant adults.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
None will now find Cupid latent By this foolish antique patent.... He came late along the waste, Shod like a traveller for haste.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
all the categories which we employ to describe conscious mental acts, such as ideas, purposes, resolutions, and so on, can be appl...ied to ... these latent states.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is log...ically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »