Still, I'm much happier here, really in it than I've been for an age. People don't hate much at the front; there's no one to hate,... except the poor devils across the way, whom they [the French soldiers] know to be as miserable as themselves. They don't talk hypocritical bosh about the beauty & manliness of war: they feel in their souls that if they weren't cowards they would have ended the thing long ago--by going home, where they want to be. And lastly and best, they don't jabber about atrocities--of course, everyone commits them--though about one story in a million that reaches our blessed Benighted States is true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The LORD went in front of them in a pillar of cloud by day, to lead them along the way, and in a pillar of fire by night, to give ...them light, so that they might travel by day and by night. Neither the pillar of cloud by day nor the pillar of fire by night left its place in front of the people.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going i...nto delirium in front of them. To hell with them!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Films are seen in large, silent, darkened theaters, where intense light beams are projected from behind toward luminous surfaces i...n front. There is an enforced and anonymous collectivity of the audience because, for any screening, all viewers are physically present at the same time in the relatively enclosed space of the theater. In contrast to this cocoon-like, enveloping situation is the fragmentary, dispersed, and varied nature of television reception. The darkness is dissolved, the anonymity removed.... While the aura of cinema spectatorship produces hypnotic fascination, the atmosphere of television enables just the opposite--because the lights are more likely to be on, one can get up and return, do several things at once, watch casually, talk to other people, or even decide to turn the television off.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And so she knelt in front of a bookcase, in driving need of the right arrangement of words; for it is a remarkable fact that she w...as left unmoved by criticisms of the sort of person she was by parents, relations, preachers, teachers, politicians and the people who write for the newspapers; whereas an unsympathetic description of a character similar to her own in a novel would send her into a condition of anxious soul-searching for days. Which suggests that it is of no use for artists to insist, with such nervous disinclination for responsibility, that their productions are only "a divine play" or "a reflection from the creative fires of irony," etc., etc., while the Marthas of this world read and search with the craving thought, What does this say about my life?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At a time when the respectable bourgeois youngsters of my generation were college freshmen, oppressed by simian sophomores and aff...ronted with balderdash daily and hourly by chalky pedagogues, I was at large in a wicked seaport of half a million people, with a front seat at every public show, as free of the night as of day, and getting earfuls of instruction in a hundred giddy arcana, none of them taught in schools.... [But] if I neglected the humanities, I was meanwhile laying in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer, or a midwife.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People who feel insecure in social situations never miss a chance to exhibit their dominance over close, submissive friends, whom ...they put down publicly, in front of everyone--by teasing, for example.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have come to the conclusion that the closer people are to what may be called the front lines of government ... the easier it is ...to see the immediate underbrush, the individual tree trunks of the moment, and to forget the nobility the usefulness and the wide extent of the forest itself.... They forget that politics after all is only an instrument through which to achieve Government.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It seems to me that there are two kinds of trickery: the "fronts" people assume before one another's eyes, and the "front" a write...r puts on the face of reality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »