"The only one who has ever been really mysterious." (Joan Crawford); "Her mystery was as thick as a London fog." (Tallulah Bankhea...d); "In a quick turn of her head, in a frank look, a boyish pout, in that proud glance from lowered lids, so pitying and yet so distant that in others it would be supercilious, in all those expressions of conscious beauty, which when imitated become clumsy, or arrogant, or ridiculous, there is a manifestation of what Hollywood cannot destroy. In the presence of this mystery all that is second-rate can be forgotten." (Cecil Beaton)LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Americans are violently oral.... That's why in America the mother is all-important and the father has no position at all--isn'...t respected in the least. Even the American passion for laxatives can be explained as an oral manifestation. They want to get rid of any unpleasantness taken in through the mouth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory--of the absol...ute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Love is the extra effort we make in our dealings with those whom we do not like and once you understand that, you understand all. ...This idea that love overtakes you is nonsense. This is but a polite manifestation of sex. To love another you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is extraordinary how the house and the simplest possessions of someone who has been left become so quickly sordid.... Even the ...stain on the coffee cup seems not coffee but the physical manifestation of one's inner stain, the fatal blot that from the beginning had marked one for ultimate aloneness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A tragic or comic plot is not a straight line: it is a parabola following the shapes of the mouths on the conventional masks. Come...dy has a U-shaped plot, with the action sinking into deep and often potentially tragic complications, and then suddenly turning upward into a happy ending. Tragedy has an inverted U, with the action rising in crisis to a peripety and then plunging downward to a catastrophe through a series of recognitions, usually of the inevitable consequences of previous acts. But in both cases what is recognized is seldom anything new; it is something which has been there all along, and which, by its reappearance or manifestation, brings the end into line with the beginning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Work, as we usually think of it, is energy expended for a further end in view; play is energy expended for its own sake, as with c...hildren's play, or as manifestation of the end or goal of work, as in "playing" chess or the piano. Play in this sense, then, is the fulfillment of work, the exhibition of what the work has been done for.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Perhaps having built a barricade when you're sixteen provides you with a sort of safety rail. If you've once taken part in buildin...g one, even inadvertently, doesn't its usually latent image reappear like a warning signal whenever you're tempted to join the police, or support any manifestation of Law and Order?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The manifestation of poetry in external life is formal perfection. True sentiment grows within, and art must represent internal ph...enomena externally.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Beauty is a precious trace that eternity causes to appear to us and that it takes away from us. A manifestation of eternity, and a... sign of death as well.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »