Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with... the beastly words that stand for them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Courage is no good: It means not scaring others. Being brave... Lets no one off the grave. Death is no different whined at than withstood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present. For ...what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The man who invented Eskimo Pie made a million dollars, so one is told, but E.E. Cummings, whose verse has been appearing off and ...on for three years now, and whose experiments should not be more appalling to those interested in poetry than the experiment of surrounding ice-cream with a layer of chocolate was to those interested in soda fountains, has hardly made a dent in the doughy minds of our so-called poetry lovers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
War is the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction... that he isn't any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone's being worse off.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In every philosophical school, three thinkers succeed one another in the following way: the first produces out of himself the sap ...and seed, the second draws it out into threads and spins a synthetic web, and the third waits in this web for the sacrificial victims that are caught in it--and tries to live off philosophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I was a boy, I had a clock with a pendulum that could be lifted off. I found that the clock went very much faster without the... pendulum. If the main purpose of a clock is to go, the clock was the better for losing its pendulum. True, it could no longer tell the time, but that did not matter if one could teach oneself to be indifferent to the passage of time. The linguistic philosophy which cares only about language and not about the world, is like the boy who preferred the clock without the pendulum because, although it no longer told the time, it went more easily than before and at a more exhilarating pace.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... should one sit down to paint the scenes among which he has grown, he will find that the facts creep in upon him. Those brillia...nt phases and shapes which the imagination sees in far-off lands are not for him to portray. Sadly he must squeeze the colour from his brush, and dip it into the grey pigments around him. He must paint what lies before him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Many's the time I've seen Barney go off, just that same way. Goodbye. Sometimes he'd wave. Ten to one he wasn't even seein' me. He... was thinkin' about all those men, you see. All those men who went out to fight, to kill, be killed. And blast his eyes, lovin' it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The grief of the keen is no personal complaint for the death of one woman over eighty years, but seems to contain the whole passio...nate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island. In this cry of pain the inner consciousness of the people seems to lay itself bare for an instant, and to reveal the mood of beings who feel their isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds and seas.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »