My friend let loose, and sneezed. The air carefully gathered itself together again, after being locally at odds with prevailing cl...imate and momentarily boycotting the trade winds. The germs were assimilated, like immigrant Jews within the overall commercial prosperity of uniform America. My friend, who had recoiled, was now well distributed in equal blocks of masses behind the reformed nose, whose recent adventure was put aside with even temper as but the sowing of wild oats. The nose, to compensate for its rash act, became a model of decorum, and was elevated as a moral precept: seen, but not heard.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If tragedy elicits our compassion, comedy appeals to our self-interest. The former confronts life's failures with noble fortitude,... the latter seeks to circumvent them with shrewd nonchalance. The one leaves us momentarily in a mood of resignation, the other in a condition of euphoria.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Old politicians, like old actors, revive in the limelight. The vacancy which afflicts them in private momentarily lifts when, once... more, they feel the eyes of an audience upon them. Their old passion for holding the centre of the stage guides their uncertain footsteps to where the footlights shine, and summons up a wintry smile when the curtain rises.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are... resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, i...s more elastic, more starry, more immortal--that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Near by is an interesting ruin--the meagre remains of an ancient heathen temple--a place where human sacrifices were offered up in... those old bygone days when the simple child of nature, yielding momentarily to sin when sorely tempted, acknowledged his error when calm reflection had shown it to him, and came forward with noble frankness and offered up his grandmother as an atoning sacrifice--in those old days when the luckless sinner could keep on cleansing his conscience and achieving periodical happiness as long as his relations held out.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying, even to someone opposite, what we th...ink, then how little we are able to convey! The phantom is through the mind and out of the window before we can lay salt on its tail, or slowly sinking and returning to the profound darkness which it has lit up momentarily with a wandering light.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »