During Prohibition days, when South Carolina was actively advertising the iodine content of its vegetables, the Hell Hole brand of... 'liquid corn' was notorious with its waggish slogan: 'Not a Goiter in a Gallon.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Wondrous hole! Magical hole! Dazzlingly influential hole! Noble and effulgent hole! From this hole everything follows logically: f...irst the baby, then the placenta, then, for years and years and years until death, a way of life. It is all logic, and she who lives by the hole will live also by its logic. It is, appropriately, logic with a hole in it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Because wretches will dash a club... against a pin-prick, even though we live in the same village, I can't even look at my lover with both eyes at once.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Life, in my estimation, is a biological misadventure that we terminate on the shoulders of six strange men whose only objective is... to make a hole in one with you.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Stupid or smart, there wasn't much choice about what was going to happen to me ... Growing up was like falling into a hole.... I m...ight not quit school, not while Mama had any say in the matter, but what difference would that make? What was I going to do in five years? Work in the textile mill? Join Mama at the diner? It all looked bleak to me. No wonder people got crazy as they grew up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There was a faith-healer of Deal Who said, "Although pain isn't real,... If I sit on a pin And it punctures my skin, I dislike what I don't think I feel."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The shadow of the Venetian blind on the painted wall, Shadows of the snake-plant and cacti, the plaster animals,... Focus the tragic melancholy of the bright stare Into nowhere, a hole like the black holes in space.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And the truth becomes a hole, something one has always known, A heaviness in the trees, and no one can say... Where it comes from, or how long it will stay A randomness, a darkness of one's own.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To "Why am I here?" To uselessness. It's the streami...ng reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The function of the hero in art is to inspire the reader or spectator to continue in the same spirit from where he, the hero, leav...es off. He must release the spectator's potentiality, for potentiality is the historic force behind nobility. And to do this the hero must be typical of the characters and class who at that time only need to be made aware of their heroic potentiality in order to be able to make their society juster and nobler. Bourgeois culture is no longer capable of producing heroes. On the highbrow level it only produces characters who are embodied consolations for defeat, and on the lowbrow level it produces idols--stars, TV "personalities," pin-ups. The function of the idol is the exact opposite to that of the hero. The idol is self-sufficient; the hero never is. The idol is so superficially desirable, spectacular, witty, happy that he or she merely supplies a context for fantasy and therefore, instead of inspiring, lulls. The idol is based on the appearance of perfection; but never on the striving towards it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »