... we've allowed a youth-centered culture to leave us so estranged from our future selves that, when asked about the years beyond... fifty, sixty, or seventy--all part of the average human life span providing we can escape hunger, violence, and other epidemics--many people can see only a blank screen, or one on which they project fear of disease and democracy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Think about the pressure to "pass" by lying about one's age ... that familiar temptation to falsify a condition of one's birth or ...identity and pretend to be part of a more favored group. Fair-skinned blacks invented "passing" as a term, Jews escaping anti-Semitism perfected the art, and the sexual closet continues the punishment, but pretending to be a younger age is probably the most encouraged form of "passing," with the least organized support for "coming out" as one's true generational self.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A river seems a magic thing. A magic, moving, living part of the very earth itself--for it is from the soil, both from its depth a...nd from its surface, that a river has its beginning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In this dream that dogs me I am part Of a silent crowd walking under a wall,... Leaving a football match, perhaps, or a pit, All moving the same way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... laws haven't the slightest interest for me--except in the world of science, in which they are always changing; or in the world... of art, in which they are unchanging; or in the world of Being in which they are, for the most part, unknown.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An honest appraisal of the respective pleasures derived from theater and cinema, at least as to what is less intellectual and more... direct about them, forces us to admit that the delight we experience at the end of a play has a more uplifting, a nobler, one might perhaps say a more moral, effect than the satisfaction which follows a good film. We seem to come away with a better conscience. In a certain sense it is as if for the man in the audience all theater is "Corneillian." From this point of view one could say that in the best films something is missing. It is as if a certain inevitable lowering of the voltage, some mysterious aesthetic short circuit, deprived us in the cinema of a certain tension which is a definite part of theater. No matter how slight this difference it undoubtedly exists, even between the worst charity production in the theater and the most brilliant of Olivier's film adaptations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaite...d him--a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured--captured by some experience to which one may have given hardly a thought.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... not only have we exploited them physically and economically to bring ease to our bodies and our purses, but also we have explo...ited them emotionally to bring us many sublimated satisfactions. Our relationship with Negroes is a many-stringed instrument upon which we play melodies to replenish all the empty places in our hearts.... The parent-child relationship is almost consciously acted out, with the obedience, seeming respect, and acceptance by "our Nigras" going far toward soothing heartaches for the rebellion, arrogance, and rejection we must endure as our real children seize their own lives from us in adolescence. Even the reverse, the child-parent role, is sometimes filled, as we play the part of babyhood helplessness, satisfying immature longings to be waited on and taken care of.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »