Laughter and weeping, the Greek masks of comedy and tragedy, mark the extremes of a continuous spectrum; both provide channels for... the overflow of emotion; both are "luxury reflexes" without apparent utility. This much they have in common; in every other respect they are direct opposites.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Human beings are distinguished by a capacity for experience as well as by their behavior, and homosexuality is as much a matter of... emotion as of genital manipulation.... As we each examine our own sense of identity we realize how much more complex is the question of homosexuality than a mere Kinsey-like computation of orgasms.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I fell her finger light Laid pausefully upon life's headlong train;--... The foot less prompt to meet the morning dew, The heart less bounding at emotion new, And hope, once crush'd, less quick to spring again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or ...unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have to confess that I had gambled on my soul and lost it with heroic insouciance and lightness of touch. The soul is so impalpa...ble, so often useless, and sometimes such a nuisance, that I felt no more emotion on losing it than if, on a stroll, I had mislaid my visiting card.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. To the co...gnition of the brain must be added the experience of the soul.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 »
There is a reportorial quality in Hemingway's work that is absent from Fitzgerald's fiction. Hemingway's technique--in his early w...ork, at least--was to let the observed detail convey emotion with no authorial analysis. Fitzgerald was more concerned with evoking and analyzing the feeling of an experience than with recording detail. As he advised his daughter, "But when in a freak moment you will want to give the low-down, not the scandal, not the merely reported but the profound essence of what happened at a prom or after it, perhaps that honesty will come to you--and then you will understand how it is possible to make even a forlorn Laplander feel the importance of a trip to Cartier's!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »