When one makes a Revolution, one cannot mark time; one must always go forward--or go back. He who now talks about the "freedom of ...the press" goes backward, and halts our headlong course towards Socialism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I can remember the day when all that a professor was supposed to do was to mark "C minus" on students' examination papers, then go... home to tea. Nowadays they seem to feel that they must know just how much we (outside the university) eat, what we do with our spare time, and how we like our eggs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off... slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For a symbol is like a rock dropped into a pool: it sends out ripples in all directions, and the ripples are in motion. Who can sa...y where the last ripple disappears? One may have a sense that he at least knows approximately the center point of all those ripples, the point at which the stone struck the water. Yet even then he has trouble marking it precisely. How does one make a mark on water? ... The ripples continue to move and the light to change on the water and the longer one watches the more changes he sees. And such shifting-and-being-at-the-same-instant is of the very sparkle and life of poetry. Of poetry and of life itself. For the poem is a dynamic and living thing. One experiences it as one experiences life--as everybody but Mr. Gradgrind experiences life. One is never done with it: every time he looks he sees something new, and it changes even as he watches. And that very sense of continuity in fluidity is one of the kinds of knowledge, one of the ways of knowing, that only the arts can teach, poetry foremost among them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Morgan: From tonight you shall get a penny for every mark on your face, sixpence for a bloody nose, a shilling for a black eye, an...d two shillings for a broken nose. Mrs. Morgan: Gwilym, stop it. (To Huw) Fight again and when you come home not another look will you get from me. Not another word. Break your nose, then. Break your mother's heart every time you go from the house.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He had fathered every folly, every sin. No goat knew gluttony like his, no cat had felt his pride, no crow his avarice. He had sai...d the psalm against envy, the psalm against anger, the psalm against sloth and the loss of hope, but they were no defense.... Without moderation or charity, without relish or enthusiasm, he'd led a wanton, heedless, selfish life. In meanness, in darkness and squalor of spirit, he had passed his time. Faithless he'd professed a faith. Faithlessly, he'd preached.... Even now he made himself a monster, overblew his vices so his charge would lack conviction. Was that not the mark of a monster?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It may be the more That no line of her writing have I,... Nor a thread of her hair, No mark of her late time as dame in her dwelling, whereby I may picture her there.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If the reviewing of books be ... "an ungentle craft," the making of them is, for the most part, a dishonest one--and that departme...nt of literature which ought to be entrusted to those only who are distinguished for their moral qualities is, not infrequently, in the hands of authors totally devoid of good taste, good feeling, and generous sentiment. The writers of Lives have, in our time, assumed a licence not enjoyed by their more scrupulous predecessors--for they interweave the adventures of the living with the memoirs of the dead; and, pretending to portray the peculiarities which sometimes mark the man of genius, they invade the privacy and disturb the peace of his surviving associates.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Writing or printing is like shooting with a rifle; you may hit your reader's mind, or miss it;Mbut talking is like playing at a ma...rk with the pipe of an engine; if it is within reach, and you have time enough, you can't help hitting it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »