You will recall the proud statement made recently by a Fascist general--"We have four columns in front of Madrid and a fifth insid...e the city."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I don't have to pound on that thick skull of yours and make big speeches as to what this mission means to us. I think you know. If... you do good, it means the lives of several thousand men, so do good.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Paul de Bursac: You don't think much of me, Captain Morgan. You're wondering why they have chosen me for this mission. I wonder to...o. As you know, I am not a brave man. On the contrary, I'm always frightened. I wish I could borrow your nature for awhile, Captain. When you meet danger, you never think of anything except how you will circumvent it. The word failure does not even exist for you. While I, I think always, suppose I fail and that I am frightened. Harry Morgan: Yeah, I can easily see how it wouldn't take much courage to get a notorious patriot off Devils' Island. But uh, but just for professional reasons, I'd like to know how you're going to do it. Paul de Bursac: We will find a way. It might fail, and if it does and I'm, I'm still alive, I will try to pass on my information, my mission, to someone else, perhaps to a better man who does not fail. Because there is always someone else. That is the mistake the Germans always make with people they try to destroy. There will be always someone else.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I cannot accept the doctrine that in poetry there is a "suspension of belief." A poet must never make a statement simply because i...t is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally ...apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the same room with me, does or can possibly hold it to be compellingly true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty..., an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most personal correspondence of today consists of letters the first half of which are given over to an indexed statement of why th...e writer hasn't written before, followed by one paragraph of small talk, with the remainder devoted to reasons why it is imperative that the letter be brought to a close.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The parent is the strongest statement that the child hears regarding what it means to be alive and real. More than what we say or ...do, the way we are expresses what we think it means to be alive. So the articulate parent is less a telling than a listening individual.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »