In philosophical inquiry, the human spirit, imitating the movement of the stars, must follow a curve which brings it back to its p...oint of departure. To conclude is to close a circle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature. That intensity may be a ...matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He might go far away out of the sound of the tramp of marching, away from the smell of overcrowded barracks where men slept in row...s like cattle, but he would still be one of them. He would not see an officer pass without an unconscious movement of servility, he would not hear a bugle without feeling sick with hatred. If he could only express these thwarted lives, the miserable dullness of industrialized slaughter, it might have been almost worthwhile--for him; for the others, it would never be worthwhile.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You'd have to be a jew like me to understand. You've heard of the Pale. Every one of us has something fenced up way down in us. We...'ve been in prison for two thousand years. I have the mind of a jailbird, that's why prison can't hurt me. That's why we throw ourselves into every movement of freedom. That's why I feel the slavery of the workers, I feel it as a worker and I feel it as a jew. Oh you can't imagine the overheated stuffiness of life at home on the East Side when I was a kid. We were all jailed in poverty and Judaism and in old customs and hatreds and wornout laws.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The feminist anti-pornography movement, no less than the feminist movement of a century ago, encourages the assumption that male a...nd female sexuality, and possibly morality, are as unlike as yin and yang.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We that are bound by vows and by promotion, With pomp of holy sacrifice and rites,... To teach belief in good and still devotion, To preach of heaven's wonders and delights-- Yet, when each of us in his own heart looks, He finds the God there far unlike his books.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The emancipation of women is practically the greatest egoistic movement of the nineteenth century, and the most intense affirmatio...n of the right of the self that history has yet seen.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nietzsche, to the end of his days, remained a Russian pastor's son, and hence two-thirds of a Puritan; he erected his war upon hol...iness, toward the end, into a sort of holy war.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Surrealism is not a school of poetry but a movement of liberation.... A way of rediscovering the language of innocence, a renewal ...of the primordial pact, poetry is the basic text, the foundation of the human order. Surrealism is revolutionary because it is a return to the beginning of all beginnings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I invented the colors of the vowels!--A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green--I made rules for the form and movement of each con...sonant, and, and with instinctive rhythms, I flattered myself that I had created a poetic language accessible, some day, to all the senses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »