The only human beings I have thoroughly admired and respected in the world have been those who carried the load of the world with ...a smile, and who, in the face of anxieties that would have knocked me clean out, never showed a tremor. Such men and women end by owning us, soul and body, and our allegiance can never be shaken. We are only too glad to be owned. Religion is nothing but this.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
White men have always controlled their wives' wages. Colored men were not able to do so until they themselves became free. Then th...ey owned both their wives and their wages.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Why do our bodies wear out? Why can't we just go on and on and on, accumulating a potentially infinite number of Frequent Flyer mi...leage points? These are the kinds of questions that philosophers have been asking ever since they realized that being a philosopher did not involve any heavy lifting. And yet the answer is really very simple. Our bodies are mechanical devices, they break down. Some devices, such as battery-operated toys costing $39.95, break down almost instantly upon exposure to the Earth's atmosphere. Other devices, such as stereo systems owned by your next-door neighbor's 13-year-old son who likes to listen to bands with names like "Nerve Damage," at a volume capable of disintegrating limestone, will continue to function perfectly for many years, even if you hit them with an ax. But the fundamental law of physics is that sooner or later every mechanism ceases to function for one reason or another, and it is never covered under the warranty.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 »
I was a closet pacifier advocate. So were most of my friends. Unknown to our mothers, we owned thirty or forty of those little suc...kers that were placed strategically around the house so a cry could be silenced in less than thirty seconds. Even though bottles were boiled, rooms disinfected, and germs fought one on one, no one seemed to care where the pacifier had been.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 »
Since time immemorial, one the dry earth, scraped to the bone, of this immeasurable country, a few men travelled ceaselessly, they... owned nothing, but they served no one, free and wretched lords in a strange kingdom. Janine did not know why this idea filled her with a sadness so soft and so vast that she closed her eyes. She only knew that this kingdom, which had always been promised to her would never be her, never again, except at this moment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So the Snark found the verdict, although as it owned, It was spent with the toils of the day:... When it said the word 'GUILTY!' the Jury all groaned, And some of them fainted away.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A father ... knows exactly what those boys at the mall have in their depraved little minds because he once owned such a depraved l...ittle mind himself. In fact, if he thinks enough about the plans that he used to have for young girls, the father not only will support his wife in keeping their daughter home but he might even run over to the mall and have a few of those boys arrested.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »