In some lyceums they tell me that they have voted to exclude the subject of religion. But how do I know what their religion is, an...d when I am near to or far from it? I have walked into such an arena and done my best to make a clean breast of what religion I have experienced, and the audience never suspected what I was about. The lecture was as harmless as moonshine to them. Whereas, if I had read to them the biography of the greatest scamps in history, they might have thought that I had written the lives of the deacons of their church. Ordinarily, the inquiry is, Where did you come from? or, Where are you going? That was a more pertinent question which I overheard one of my auditors put to another once,--"What does he lecture for?" It made me quake in my shoes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Merely to come into the world the heir of a fortune is not to be born, but to be still-born, rather. To be supported by the charit...y of friends, or a government pension,--provided you continue to breathe,--by whatever fine synonyms you describe these relations, is to go into the almshouse. On Sundays the poor debtor goes to church to take an account of stock, and finds, of course, that his outgoes have been greater than his income. In the Catholic Church, especially, they go into chancery, make a clean confession, give up all, and think to start again. Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The language of the game is interesting. You can think of the pauses as caesuras, breaks between the lines. As a poem the game is ...composed of a number of short lines representing the pitches. The number of lines per batter form a stanza. Then there is a space. Sometimes the stanzas become breathless, rushing full paragraphs that build rapidly on each other until the poem-inning explodes. The poem lives for this sudden blossoming out of prosodic regularity. Should someone make a computer analysis of baseball prosody, I believe that they would come up with something close to the prosody of some great American lyrical epic, Whitman's Leaves of Grass, let's say, or Doc Williams's Patterson.... The game is definitely an epic ... formed of many lyrical moments dependent on silences for their effectiveness. An unfolding story punctuated by brief emotional swellings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point... of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting--the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People who are having a love-sex relationship are continuously lying to each other because the very nature of the relationship dem...ands that they do, because you have to make a love object of this person, which means that you editorialize about them.... You cut out what you don't want to see, you add this if it isn't there. And so therefore you're building a lie.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The present war having so long cut off all communication with Great-Britain, we are not able to make a fair estimate of the state ...of science in that country. The spirit in which she wages war is the only sample before our eyes, and that does not seem the legitimate offspring either of science or of civilization.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Capt. York: Colonel, if you send out the regiment, Cochise'll think I've tricked him. Col. Thursday: Exactly, we have tricked... him. Tricked him into returning to American soil, and I intend to see that he stays here. Capt. York: Col. Thursday, I gave my word to Cochise. No man is going to make a liar out of me, sir. Col. Thursday: Your word to a breach-cladded savage, an illiterate, uncivilized murderer and treaty breaker. There's no question of honor, sir, between an American officer and Cochise. Capt. York: There is to me, sir.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »