Whereas the child is chiefly playful and experimental, the adult focuses on specific and conscious experiences. He practices selec...tive inattention to the objects for which he has no immediate use and develops a kind of tunnel vision that helps him to move toward selected goals. This focusing on a limited range of experiences and goals is largely responsible for one's individual evolution and gives a deep and almost tragic significance to a statement made by Albert Camus in his novel La Chute: "Après un certain âge tout homme est responsable do son visage." An almost identical statement appears as the last entry in George Orwell's notebooks: "At 50, everyone has the face he deserves." There could not any more absolute affirmation of belief in personal responsibility for the quality of one's own life and character.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks ... or lay down on a couch, and think of anything tha...t comes into your head, especially the miseries.... Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don't bother about sentences, in sections of two, three or four lines each.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For most of my adult life, I have been an emotional hit-and- run driver--that is, a reporter. I made people like me, trust me, ope...n their hearts and their minds to me, and cry and bleed on to the pages of my neat little notebooks, and then I went back to a safe place and made a story out of it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The first duty of a lecturer--to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your no...tebooks and keep on the mantlepiece for ever.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
(Heinrich von) Kleist would not be a Prussian if his first thought would not have been orderliness ... and he would not be a Germa...n if he had not placed all his hopes of developing this inner orderliness into education. Education is the secret of life for him as for every German: studying, learning a lot from books, sitting in lectures, keeping notebooks, listening intently to professors....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I against my brother I and my brother against our cousin... I, my brother and our cousin against the neighbors All of us against the foreigner.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »