What one really wants is youth, and what one really loses is years. Life becomes at last a mere piece of acting. One goes on by ha...bit, playing more or less clumsily that one is still alive. It is ludicrous and at times humiliating, but there is a certain style in it which youth has not. We become all, more or less, gentlemen; we are ancien régime; we learn to smile while gout racks us.... We get out of bed in the morning all broken up, without nerves, color or temper, and by noon we are joking with young women about the play. One lives in constant company with diseased hearts, livers, kidneys and lungs; one shakes hands with certain death at closer embrace every day; one sees paralysis in every feature and feels it in every muscle; all one's functions relax their action day by day; and, what is worse, one's grasp on the interests of life relaxes with the physical relaxation; and, through it all, we improve; our manners acquire refinement; our sympathies grow wider; our youthful self-consciousness disappears; very ordinary men and women are found to have charm; our appreciations have weight; we should almost get to respect ourselves if we knew of anything human to respect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the one lesson in the ultimate triumph of any great actress has been to enforce the fact that a method all technique or a meth...od all throes, is either one or the other inadequate, and often likely to work out in close proximity to the ludicrous.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendenci...es and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Humour is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something e...lse. Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident; wit is the product of art and fancy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In San Francisco, vulgarity, "bad taste," ostentation are regarded as a kind of alien blight, an invasion or encroachment from out...side. In Los Angeles, there is so much money and power connected with ostentation that is no longer ludicrous: it commands a kind of respect. For if the mighty behave like this, then quiet good taste means that you can't afford the conspicuous expenditures, and you become a little ashamed of your modesty and propriety.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I felt puny and absurd, a ludicrous midget. Easy enough to talk of soul and spirit and essential worth, but not when you're three ...feet tall.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the whole Wilsonian buncombe ... its ideational hollowness, its ludicrous strutting and bombast, its heavy dependence upon gre...asy and meaningless words, its frequent descents to mere sound and fury, signifying nothing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This incredible work is an almost inexhaustible mine of bad writing, faulty generalizing, childish pussyfooting, ludicrous posturi...ng, and naïve stupidity. To find a match for it one must try to imagine a biography of the Duke of Wellington by his barber.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If all feeling for grace and beauty were not extinguished in the mass of mankind at the actual moment, such a method of locomotion... as cycling could never have found acceptance; no man or woman with the slightest aesthetic sense could assume the ludicrous position necessary for it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »