I always looked to about thirty as the barrier of any real or fierce delight in the passions, and determined to work them out in t...he younger ore and better veins of the mine--and I flatter myself (perhaps) that I have pretty well done so--and now the dross is coming.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I was born to be an editor, I always edit everything. I edit my room at least once a week. Hotels are made for me. I can change a ...hotel room so thoroughly that even its proprietor doesn't recognize it.... I edit people's clothes, dressing them infallibly in the right lines.... I change everyone's coiffure--except those that please me--and these I gaze at with such satisfaction that I become suspect, I edit people's tones of voice, their laughter, their words. I change their gestures, their photographs. I change the books I read, the music I hear ... It's this incessant, unavoidable observation, this need to distinguish and impose, that has made me an editor. I can't make things. I can only revise what has been made.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are beginning to wonder whether a servant girl hasn't the best of it after all. She knows how the salad tastes without the dres...sing, and she knows how life's lived before it gets to the parlor door.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The artist's personality must be left in his dressing-room; his soul must be denuded of its own sensations and clothed with the ba...se or noble qualities he is called upon to exhibit.... [he] must leave behind him the cares and vexations of life, throw aside his personality for several hours, and move in the dream of another life, forgetting everything.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Such a set of tittle tattle, prittle prattle visitants! Oh Dear! I am so sick of the ceremony and fuss of these fall lall people! ...So much dressing--chitchat--complimentary nonsense--In short, a country town is my detestation. All the conversation is scandal, all the attention, dress, and almost all the heart, folly, envy, and censoriousness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Its idea of "production value" is spending a million dollars dressing up a story that any good writer would throw away. Its vision... of the rewarding movie is a vehicle for some glamour-puss with two expressions and eighteen changes of costume, or for some male idol of the muddled millions with a permanent hangover, six worn-out acting tricks, the build of a lifeguard, and the mentality of a chicken-strangler.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Much of the pressure contemporary parents feel with respect to dressing children in designer clothes, teaching young children acad...emics, and giving them instruction in sports derives directly from our need to use our children to impress others with our economic surplus. We find "good" rather than real reasons for letting our children go along with the crowd.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Contramasculinity: the apparent selflessness of the female, who allows every man who comes her way to shape her; her lack of resis...tance, her limitlessness, that softness and pliancy which basically never take seriously the shape the man gives her. She is always capable of being molded to new shapes: this is what a man describes as the harlot in her, a basic element of the female character that he can never fathom. One might also call it playacting. Playing at being somebody different, at dressing up. When a man wraps himself in a costume, is he not in fact taking a step in the direction of perversion, femininity, contramasculinity?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Haggerty: Girls! Girls! Girls! Be careful of my hats. Chorus Girl: Well, we gotta get down on the stage.... Haggerty: I don't care. I won't allow you to ruin them. Dressing Room Matron: See, I told you. They were too high and too wide. Haggerty: Well, Big Woman, I designed the costumes for the show, not the doors for the theater. Dressing Room Matron: I know that. If you had, they'd have been done in lavender.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »