Think of admitting the details of a single case of the criminal court into our thoughts, to stalk profanely through their very san...ctum sanctorum for an hour, ay, for many hours! to make a very barroom of the mind's inmost apartment, as if for so long the dust of the street had occupied us,--the very street itself, with all its travel, its bustle, and filth, had passed through our thoughts' shrine! Would it not be an intellectual and moral suicide?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 »