The "sayings" of a community, its proverbs, are its characteristic comment upon life; they imply its history, suggest its attitude... toward the world and its way of accepting life. Such an idiom makes the finest language any writer can have; and he can never get it with a notebook. He himself must be able to think and feel in that speech--it is a gift from heart to heart.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The test of a given phrase would be: Is it worthy to be immortal? To "make a beeline" for something. That's worthy of being immort...al and is immortal in English idiom. "I guess I'll split" is not going to be immortal and is excludable, therefore excluded.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he "wants a woman." Strictly speaking, a ...woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition (one does not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes). Now Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give. No lover in the world ever sought the embraces of the woman he loved as the result of a calculation, however unconscious, that they would be more pleasurable than those of any other woman.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Psychobabble is ... a set of repetitive verbal formalities that kills off the very spontaneity, candor, and understanding it prete...nds to promote. It's an idiom that reduces psychological insight to a collection of standardized observations, that provides a frozen lexicon to deal with an infinite variety of problems.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And from the first declension of the flesh I learnt man's tongue, to twist the shapes of thoughts... Into the stony idiom of the brain....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have developed a visionary modern lyric, and, for it, an idiom in which I can write lyrically, colloquially, and dramatically. M...y subject is city life--with its sofas, hotel corridors, cinemas, underworlds, cardboard suitcases, self-willed buses, banknotes, soapy bathrooms, newspaper-filled parks; and its anguish, its enraged excitement, its great lonely joys.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »