The old guard may grumble and occasionally sue, but in a society where Portnoy's Complaint is a record-breaking best- seller sexua...l permissiveness is no longer an issue. The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively, in their nerve-ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified, and inescapably part of the society we have created.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasiona...lly lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for tho...se that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
She loved money, but could occasionally part with it, especially to men of learning, whose patronage she affected. She often conve...rsed with them, and bewildered herself in their metaphysical disputes, which neither she nor they themselves understood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...A shadow now occasionally crossed my simple, sanguine, and life enjoying mind, a notion that I was never really going to accomp...lish those powerful literary works which would blow a noble trumpet to social generosity and noblesse oblige before the world. What? should I find myself always planning and never achieving ... a richly complicated and yet firmly unified novel?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Boasting is often carried by certain Americans to the extreme. Often however it is a reaction against slights, an effort to veil d...eficiencies, an effort made by a people aware of them, but on the other hand conscious of having accomplished in two or three generations what it took other nations centuries to perform. Generally, human nature revolts at taunts, at arrogant reproof, at undervaluation. Experience and time alone teach a becoming equanimity. European nations bear scoffing more patiently because they have thrown it occasionally for centuries at each other's head. Like old war horses accustomed to the roar of battles, they remain cool and self-possessed. There is on the American surface much to be rubbed off and rounded. Rude angles are to be soft ened, ease, flexibility instilled. Time must do the work. Refinement is a fruit slowly ripened by ages.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In chess we find several quite crisp distinctions that can also be discerned rather more problematically in the larger game of lif...e. There are, for instance, the "forced moves" in chess. Moves are occasionally forced by the rules of chess: in these instances one finds oneself so boxed in that one and only one legal move is available.... More interesting ... are the forced moves on those occasions when there is more than one legal move, but only one non-idiotic, non-"suicidal" move, which is said for that reason to be forced. It is forced not by the rules of chess, and not by the laws of physics, but by the dictates of reason. It is obviously the only rational thing to do, given one's interest in winning (or just not losing) the game.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »