If the family were a container, it would be a nest, an enduring nest, loosely woven, expansive, and open. If the family were a fru...it, it would be an orange, a circle of sections, held together but separable--each segment distinct. If the family were a boat, it would be a canoe that makes no progress unless everyone paddles. If the family were a sport, it would be baseball: a long, slow, nonviolent game that is never over until the last out. If the family were a building, it would be an old but solid structure that contains human history, and appeals to those who see the carved moldings under all the plaster, the wide plank floors under the linoleum, the possibilities.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A pragmatic race, the Japanese appear to have decided long ago that the only reason for drinking alcohol is to become intoxicated ...and therefore drink only when they wish to be drunk. So I went out into the night and the neon and let the crowd pull me along, walking blind, willing myself to be just a segment of that mass organism, just one more drifting chip of consciousness under the geodesics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just as a large segment of liberal political opinion never could accept Nixon as a "legitimate" president, neither can a large seg...ment of conservative political opinion today accept Clinton's legitimacy in the Oval Office.... Nixon's slash-and-burn politics, Red-baiting and smarmy sanctimony earned him the undying enmity of otherwise tolerant liberals long before he turned the crime of Watergate into a fatal political blunder. For Clinton, draft ducking, toking on a marijuana cigarette and a family life that he acknowledges has not been perfect create the same effect: He is unable to establish moral authority with opponents who might otherwise be open to his centrist style and policies.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 »
Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger ...part, is silence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little s...tar-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.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 »