Hardly had the glow been kindled by some good deed on your part or by some little triumph over your rivals or by a word of praise ...from your parents or mentors when it would begin to cool and fade leaving you in a very short time as chill and dim as before.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If melodrama is the quintessence of drama, farce is the quintessence of theatre. Melodrama is written. A moving image of the world... is provided by a writer. Farce is acted. The writer's contribution seems not only absorbed but translated.... One cannot imagine melodrama being improvised. The improvised drama was pre-eminently farce.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Edith: This complete loveliness will fade. And we shall forget what it was like. Edward: Edith, don't.... Edith: Oh, it's bound to. Just a few years and the gilt wears off the gingerbread. Edward: Darling, answer me one thing truthfully. Have you ever seen gingerbread with gilt on it? Edith: [laughing] Fool! Edward: Then the whole argument is disposed of.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"O life of this our Spring! why fades the lotus of the water? Why fade these children of the Spring,born but to smile and fal...l?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is unjust that Italy should claim musical pre-eminence, even forcing Italian on music as its international language, when Italy...'s genius is so visual. No nation can build towns as beautiful nor claim a better right to regard nature as a shapeless substance to be redeemed by urbifaction. The Italians are not Wordsworthian. Man fulfils himself in the town. There is too much wild nature in music, and it has to be tamed into simple four-square patterns, as in Verdi and Bellini. The tenor does not proclaim Byronically to the woods and hills: he is a kind of sexy politician for the town piazza. The Italians would listen to Aaron, but not to Moses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over... the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... he held it one of the prettiest attitudes of the feminine mind to adore a man's pre- eminence without too precise a knowledge ...of what it consisted in.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Life is comic or pitiful as soon as the high ends of being fade out of sight, and man becomes near-sighted, and can only attend to... what addresses the senses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »