Words are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things;we need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apar...t from and against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness, and can re-look at the world without blinkers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the grand-daughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slaver...y is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said "On the line!" The Reconstruction said "Go!" I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A nationally known advertising man wrote me the other day ... to suggest that we tell the truth, i.e., that we are not concerned w...ith the affairs of the British Empire but are concerned with our own safety ... the integrity of our own continent, and the lives of our own children in the next generation. That, I think, is a pretty good line to take because it happens to be true, and it is on that line itself that we must, for ... purely selfish reasons, prevent at almost any hazard the Axis domination of the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I decided that I want to live the rest of my life happy with what I'm doing. So when I play tennis again, I have to play it for th...e right reason. I don't want to play to get my No. 1 ranking back. I don't want to play for the attention, or to earn more. I don't even want to play because the world wants to see me do it, even though it's nice to know that the world is interested. I only want to play because I love the game, which is the reason I began to play at age seven in the first place.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is something in this native land business and you cannot get away from it, in peace time you do not seem to notice it much p...articularly when you live in foreign parts but when there is a war and you are all alone and completely cut off from knowing about your country well then there it is, your native land is your native land, it certainly is.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Though most of us don't hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, y...ou have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes. Animals that hear high frequencies better than we do--bats and dolphins, for instance--seem to see richly with their ears, hearing geographically, but for us the world becomes most densely informative, most luscious, when we take it in through our eyes. It may even be that abstract thinking evolved from our eyes' elaborate struggle to make sense of what they saw. Seventy percent of the body's sense receptors cluster in the eyes, and it is mainly through seeing the world that we appraise and understand it. Lovers close their eyes when they kiss because, if they didn't, there would be too many visual distractions to notice and analyze.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Remember how often you have postponed minding your interest, and let slip those opportunities the gods have given you. It is now h...igh time to consider what sort of world you are part of, and from what kind of governor of it you are descended; that you have a set period assigned you to act in, and unless you improve it to brighten and compose your thoughts, it will quickly run off with you, and be lost beyond recovery.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Destroy yourselves, you who are desperate, and you who are tortured in body and soul, abandon all hope. There is no more solace fo...r you in this world. The world lives off your rotting flesh.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
With one fist clenched behind his head, heel drawn up to thigh The cocky little ogre dozes off, ready,... Though, to take on the rest Of the world at the drop of a hat or the mildest Nudge of the impossible,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »