The form of act or thought mattered nothing. The hymns of David, the plays of Shakespeare, the metaphysics of Descartes, the crime...s of Borgia, the virtues of Antonine, the atheism of yesterday and the materialism of to-day, were all emanation of divine thought, doing their appointed work. It was the duty of the church to deal with them all, not as though they existed through a power hostile to the deity, but as instruments of the deity to work out his unrevealed ends.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
With sweet May dews my wings were wet, And Phoebus fir'd my vocal rage;... He caught me in his silken net, And shut me in his golden cage.
He loves to sit and hear me sing, Then, laughing, sports and plays with me; Then stretches out my golden wing, And mocks my loss of liberty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[Allegory] should ... be very sparingly practised, lest, whilst the writer plays with his own fancies and diverts himself by cutti...ng the air with his wide spread wings, he should soar out of view of his readers, leaving them in confusion and perplexity to explore his viewless track.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As long as lightly all their livelong sessions, Like a yardful of schoolboys out at recess... Before their plays and games were organized, They yelling mix tag, hide-and-seek, hopscotch, And leapfrog in each other's way all's well.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The basic unit of construction in the theatre is the scene, and the amount of dramatic time that elapses during a scene is roughly... equal to the length of time the scene takes to perform. To be sure, some plays cover many years, but in general these years pass "between curtains." We're informed that it is "seven years later," either by a stage direction or by the dialogue. The basic unit of construction in movies is the shot, which can lengthen or shorten time more subtly, since the average shot lasts only ten or fifteen seconds. Drama has to chop out huge blocks of time between the relatively few scenes and acts; films can expand or contract time between the many hundreds of shots.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the combined names of Social Intercourse, Meeting Interesting People, and Getting Out of a Rut, I have taken, in my time, some ...terrible beatings. I have listened to poets rendering their own odes. I have had the plots of yet unwritten plays given me in tiniest detail, I have assisted in charades, I have been politely mystified by card tricks, I have even been sent out of the room and been forced, on my return, to ask the assembled company such questions as I hoped might reveal to me what Famous Character in Fiction they represented. I have spent entire evenings knee-deep in derry-down-derries, listening to quaint old English ballads done without accompaniment; I have been backed into cold corners by pianos while composers showed me how that thing they wrote three years before Gershwin did "The Man I Love" went; I knew a young man who has an inlaid ukelele. You see these gray hairs? Well, making whoopee with the intelligentsia was the way I earned them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In baseball, home plate is where you begin your journey and also your destination. You venture out onto the bases, to first and se...cond and third, always striving to return to the spot from which you began. There is danger on the basepath--pick-offs, rundowns, force-outs, double plays--and safety only back at home. I am not saying, as a true fan would, that baseball is the key to life; rather, life is the key to baseball. We play or watch this game because it draws pictures of our desires.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
you who put gum in my coffee cup and worms in my Jell-O, you who let me pretend... you were daddy of the poets, witchman, you stand for all, for all the bad dead, a Salvation Army Band who plays for no one. I am cement. The bird in me is blind as I knife out your name and all your dead kind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I felt more than ever the necessity of my mission. But I went home out of spirits, I hardly know why. I must work by myself all li...fe long.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »