People who live in the post-totalitarian system know only too well that the question of whether one or several political parties a...re in power, and how these parties define and label themselves, is of far less importance than the question of whether or not it is possible to live like a human being.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just across the Green from the post office is the county jail, seldom occupied except by some backwoodsman who has been intemperat...e; the courthouse is under the same roof. The dog warden usually basks in the sunlight near the harness store or the post office, his golden badge polished bright.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Navajo men and boys have an odd way of showing their friendship. When two young men meet at the trading post, a "Sing", or a dance... they greet each other, inquire about the health of their respective families, then stand silently some ten or fifteen minutes while one feels the other's arms, shoulders, and chest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I was born to be an editor, I always edit everything. I edit my room at least once a week. Hotels are made for me. I can change a ...hotel room so thoroughly that even its proprietor doesn't recognize it.... I edit people's clothes, dressing them infallibly in the right lines.... I change everyone's coiffure--except those that please me--and these I gaze at with such satisfaction that I become suspect, I edit people's tones of voice, their laughter, their words. I change their gestures, their photographs. I change the books I read, the music I hear ... It's this incessant, unavoidable observation, this need to distinguish and impose, that has made me an editor. I can't make things. I can only revise what has been made.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What we know is not capable of being otherwise; of things capable of being otherwise we do not know, when they have passed outside... our observation, whether they exist or not. Therefore the object of knowledge is of necessity. Therefore it is eternal; for things that are of necessity in the unqualified sense are all eternal; and things that are eternal are ungenerated and imperishable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The general feeling was, and for a long time remained, that one had several children in order to keep just a few. As late as the s...eventeenth century . . . people could not allow themselves to become too attached to something that was regarded as a probable loss. This is the reason for certain remarks which shock our present-day sensibility, such as Montaigne's observation, "I have lost two or three children in their infancy, not without regret, but without great sorrow."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's impossible to represent a saint [in Art]. It becomes boring. Perhaps because he is, like the Saturday Evening Post people, in... the position of having almost infinitely free will.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The post-office had a great charm at one period of our lives. When you have lived to my age, you will begin to think letters are n...ever worth going through the rain for.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The criterion which we use to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact is the criterion of verifyability. We say that a... sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express--that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as true, or reject it as being false.... To make our position clearer, we may formulate it in another way. Let us call a proposition which records an actual or possible observation an experiential proposition. Then we may say that it is the mark of a genuine factual proposition, not that it should be equivalent to an experiential proposition, or any finite number of experiential propositions, but simply that some experiential propositions can be deduced from it in conjunction with certain other premises without being deducible from those other premises alone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My business is stanching blood and feeding fainting men; my post the open field between the bullet and the hospital. I sometimes d...iscuss the application of a compress or a wisp of hay under a broken limb, but not the bearing and merits of a political movement. I make gruel--not speeches; I write letters home for wounded soldiers, not political addresses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »