A black pall, you know, with a silver cross on it, or R.I.P.--requiescat in pace--you know. That seems to me the most beautiful ex...pression--I like it much better than 'He is a jolly good fellow,' which is simply rowdy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A long war like this makes you realise the society you really prefer, the home, goats chickens and dogs and casual acquaintances. ...I find myself not caring at all for gardens flowers or vegetables cats cows and rabbits, one gets tired of trees vines and hills, but houses, goats chickens dogs and casual acquaintances never pall.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you would see how interwoven it is in the warp and woof of civilization ... go at night-fall to the top of one of the down-town... steel giants and you may see how in the image of material man, at once his glory and his menace, is this thing we call a city. There beneath you is the monster, stretching acre upon acre into the far distance. High over head hangs the stagnant pall of its fetid breath, reddened with light from myriad eyes endlessly, everywhere blinking. Thousands of acres of cellular tissue, the city's flesh outspreads layer upon layer, enmeshed by an intricate network of veins and arteries radiating into the gloom, and in them, with muffled, persistent roar, circulating as the blood circulates in your veins, is the almost ceaseless beat of the activity to whose necessities it all conforms. The poisonous waste is drawn from the system of this gigantic creature by infinitely ramifying, thread-like ducts, gathering at their sensitive terminals matter destructive of its life, hurrying it to millions of small intestines to be collected in turn by larger, flowing to the great sewers, on to the drainage canal, and finally to the ocean.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To suppose that "I know" is a descriptive phrase, is only one example of the descriptive fallacy, so common in philosophy. Even if... some language is now purely descriptive, language was not in origin so, and much of it is still not so. utterance of obvious ritual phrases, in the appropriate circumstances, is not describing the action we are doing, but doing it ("I do"): in other cases it functions, like tone and expression, or again like punctuation and mood, as an intimation that we are employing language in a special way ("I warn," "I ask," "I define"). Such phrases cannot, strictly, be lies, though they can "imply" lies, as "I promise" implies that I fully intend, which may be true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They had supposed their formula was fixed. They had obeyed instructions to devise... A type of cold, a type of hooded gaze. But when the Negroes came they were perplexed. These Negroes looked like men....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Children's bodies aren't like automobiles with the assailant's fingerprints lingering on the wheel. The world of sexual abuse is q...uintessentially secret. It is the perfect crime.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »