I used to like this town.... Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but good-hearted and peacefu...l.... Now ... we've got the big money, the sharpshooters, the percentage workers, the fast dollar boys, the hoodlums out of New York and Chicago and Detroit--and Cleveland. We've got the flash restaurants and night clubs they run, and the hotels and apartment houses they own, and the grifters and con men and female bandits that live in them. The luxury trades, the pansy decorators, the Lesbian dress designers, the riff-raff of a big hardboiled city with no more personality than a paper cup.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And like that game with which the Japanese amuse themselves by dipping in a porcelain bowl of water, small bits of paper which, un...til then were indistinct, but, scarcely plunged in the water, stretch, distort, become colored, differentiated, turn into flowers, houses, substantial and recognizable personages,in the same manner all the flowers in our garden and those of Mr. Swann's park, and the water-lilies of the Vivonne, and the good people of the village and their little homes and the church and all of Combray and its environs, all this which takes shape and solidifies, has come, town and gardens, from my cup of tea.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is to be done with people who can't read a Sunday paper without messing it all up?... Show me a Sunday paper which has been l...eft in a condition fit only for kite flying, and I will show you an antisocial and dangerous character who has left it that way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There may be in the cup A spider steeped, and one may drink, depart,... And yet partake no venom, for his knowledge Is not infected; but if one present Th'abhorred ingredient to his eye, make known How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides, With violent hefts. I have drunk, and seen the spider.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The hand that signed the paper felled a city; Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,... Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country; These five kings did a king to death.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A crazy man that found a cup, When all but dead of thirst,... Hardly dared to wet his mouth Imagining, moon-accursed, That another mouthful And his beating heart would burst.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All the reputedly powerful reactionaries are merely paper tigers. The reason is that they are divorced from the people. Look! Was ...not Hitler a paper tiger? Was Hitler not overthrown?... U.S. imperialism has not yet been overthrown and it has the atomic bomb. I believe it also will be overthrown. It, too, is a paper tiger.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »