The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and rem...ain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I cannot love anyone if I hate myself. That is the reason why we feel so extremely uncomfortable in the presence of people who are... noted for their special virtuousness, for they radiate an atmosphere of the torture they inflict on themselves. That is not a virtue but a vice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As each Sister is to become a Co-Worker of Christ in the slums, each ought to understand what God and the Missionaries of Charity ...expect from her. Let Christ radiate and live his life in her and through her in the slums. Let the poor, seeing her, be drawn to Christ and invite him to enter their homes and their lives. Let the sick and suffering find in her a real angel of comfort and consolation. Let the little ones of the streets cling to her because she reminds them of him, the friend of the little ones.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Except for the beast fables, which are anciently derived from the world's multi-racial heritage, American Negro humor is rooted in... social oppression. And--again excepting the animal fables--it differs from classical Western and white American humor in another respect. It is totally devoid of those myth-making and myth-transmuting elements and symbols that appeal so deeply to the American mind in the works of the tall-tale tellers such as Davy Crockett, Seba Smith, Mike Fink, and Mark Twain. There are no Rip Van Winkles, Johnny Appleseeds, Paul Bunyans, or Calamity Janes--and none bearing the faintest resemblance to them--in Negro American humor. The myth-making figures in the literature of black Americans are the blues-haunted characters. They are Stagolee, John Henry, and Big Boy; they are Mary Lou, Frankie, and Sister Caroline. And they are not funny, least of all to the nameless hundreds of folk-Negroes who created them and the still-living thousands who love them and perpetuate them in song and story.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I feel I must learn to speak the Baa of the simple-minded, while my mind... dives into the multi-colored crowded voices, cries for help, My breasts are off me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The stage is three-dimensional, the movie multi-dimensional.... The stage play can create epic, for example, only by borrowing mov...ie methods. The movie, likewise, can debate ideas only by imitating the relative stasis of theater and, in pursuit of ideas or not, it unnaturally limits its prowess by containing action within one room or other closely confined area.... The imperative of movie motion makes any concession to the working principles of theater a retrograde act, for the form of a play must be violated in order to be converted; if this violation is shirked, the movie's integrity will be sacrificed for that of the play. One cannot possibly imagine a fluid movie adapted from a play by Moliere, Chekhov, Sternheim, or Pirandello, unless the original content were disastrously modified. Nor can the social dramas of Ibsen and the discursive comedies of Shaw profit from the movie medium. Their action, in the literal sense, is not going anywhere; their moods and theses can only be dissipated by a compulsively mobile camera.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram... Within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men who care passionately for women attach themselves at least as much to the temple and to the accessories of the cult as to thei...r goddess herself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »