There's a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most p...eople go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men have a low threshold for distraction. They are delicate. They are made nervous by having to do more than one thing at a time. ...They feel frazzled and angry if they have to answer three phone calls, and have a hard time settling back to work after the trauma. Women, on the other hand, develop the skill of doing many things at once. They tuck the phone in between their shoulders and their ears, hold a baby on one hip, stir a pot on the stove, all the while thinking about an idea for a story. They don't think it's unfair to have to do this. They think it's normal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People get real comfortable with their features. Nobody gets comfortable with their hair. Hair trauma. It's the universal thing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I were twenty or thirty years younger, I would start afresh in this field with the certainty of accomplishing much. But I shoul...d have to learn from the bottom up, forgetting the theatre entirely and concentrating on the special medium of this new art. My mistake, and that of many others, lay in employing "theatrical" techniques despite every effort to avoid them. Here is something quite, quite fresh, a penetrating form of visual poetry, an untried exponent of the human soul. Alas, I am too old for it!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Life is very narrow. Bring any club or company of intelligent men together again after ten years, and if the presence of some pene...trating and calming genius could dispose them to frankness, what a confession of insanities would come up!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am afraid I am one of those people who continues to read in the hope of sometime discovering in a book a single--and singular--p...iece of wisdom so penetrating, so soul stirring, so utterly applicable to my own life as to make all the bad books I have read seem well worth the countless hours spent on them. My guess is that this wisdom, if it ever arrives, will do so in the form of a generalization.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The same polarity of the male and female principle exists in nature; not only, as is obvious in animals and plants, but in the pol...arity of the two fundamental functions, that of receiving and penetrating. It is the polarity of earth and rain, of the river and the ocean, of night and day, of darkness and light, of matter and spirit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[As teenager], the trauma of near-misses and almost- consequences usually brings us to our senses. We finally come down someplace ...between our parents' safety advice, which underestimates our ability, and our own unreasonable disregard for safety, which is our childlike wish for invulnerability. Our definition of acceptable risk becomes a product of our own experience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is remarkable by how much a pinch of malice enhances the penetrating power of an idea or an opinion. Our ears, it seems, are wo...nderfully attuned to sneers and evil reports about our fellow men.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »