Auden, MacNeice, Day Lewis, I have read them all, Hoping against hope to hear the authentic call . . .... And know the explanation I must pass is this MYou cannot light a match on a crumbling wall.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the game of "Whist for two," usually called "Correspondence," the lady plays what card she likes: the gentleman simply follows ...suit. If she leads with "Queen of Diamonds," however, he may, if he likes, offer the "Ace of Hearts": and, if she plays "Queen of Hearts," and he happens to have no Heart left, he usually plays "Knave of Clubs."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I read The Sound and the Fury or Middlemarch, I'm filled with the aromas of either book, with past readings and relationships t...o the characters, with a whole continent of language and scenes, but the books don't frighten me. I can enter into their dream songs, and leave at my own will. But if I'm watching Casablanca on the wall, I'll let my eye slip past the phony details, the studio-bound streets, the laughable sense of a fabricated city, and drift into that dream of Humphrey Bogart and Rick's Cafe Americain, which exists outside any laws of physics, like the eternal dream of Hollywood itself, a little dopey, but with a power we can't resist.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out,... And to whom I was like to give offense. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill; And on a day we meet to walk the line... And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the ...only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sinclair Lewis is the perfect example of the false sense of time of the newspaper world.... [ellipsis in source] He was always dom...inated by an artificial time when he wrote Main Street.... He did not create actual human beings at any time. That is what makes it newspaper. Sinclair Lewis is the typical newspaperman and everything he says is newspaper. The difference between a thinker and a newspaperman is that a thinker enters right into things, a newspaperman is superficial.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »