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 »
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 »
I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this wh...en I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The real thinking of woman ... is pre-eminently practical and applied. It is something we describe as sound common sense, and is u...sually directed to what is close at hand and personal.... In general, it can be said that feminine mentality manifests an undeveloped, childlike, or primitive character; instead of the thirst for knowledge, curiosity; instead of judgment, prejudice; instead of thinking, imagination or dreaming; instead of will, wishing. Where a man takes up objective problems, a woman contents herself with solving riddles; where he battles for knowledge and understanding, she contents herself with faith or superstition, or else she makes assumptions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
you in San Quentin, who wrote, "Being German my hero is Hitler,"... instead of "Sincerely yours," at the end of long, neat-scripted letters demolishing the pre-Raphaelites:LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I shall, I suppose, always remember how The flock of notes those antique negroes blew... Out of Chicago air into A huge remembering pre-electric horn....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When he was a crawler he left your feet to journey to the sofa and bring you a ball. When he was a toddler he left your side to jo...urney across the grass and bring you a leaf. When he was a pre-school child he left your yard to journey next door and bring you back a neighbor's doll. Now he will journey into school and bring you back a piece of his new world....His journeys are all outwards now, into that waiting world. But he feels the invisible and infinitely elastic threads that still guide him back to you. He returns to the base that is you, seeking rest and re-charging for each new leap into life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »