It is one of the prodigious privileges of art that the horrific, artistically expressed, becomes beauty, and that sorrow, given rh...ythm and cadence, fills the spirit with a calm joy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Large department stores, with their luxuriant abundance of canned goods, foods, and clothing, are like the primary landscape and t...he geometrical locus of affluence. Streets with overcrowded and glittering store windows ... the displays of delicacies, and all the scenes of alimentary and vestimentary festivity, stimulate a magical salivation. Accumulation is more than the sum of its products: the conspicuousness of surplus, the final and magical negation of scarcity ... mimic a new-found nature of prodigious fecundity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What will you say, when I tell you truly, that I cannot possibly read our countryman Milton through. I acknowledge him to have mos...t sublime passages, some prodigious flashes of light; but then you must acknowledge that light is often followed by darkness visible, to use his own expression.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She... may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In its use of words poetry is just the reverse of science. Very definite thoughts do occur, but not because the words are so chose...n as logically to bar out all possibilities save one. No. But because the manner, the tone of voice, the cadence and rhythm play upon our interests and make them pick out from among an indefinite number of possibilities the precise particular thought which they need. That is why poetical descriptions often seem so much more accurate than prose descriptions. Language logically and scientifically used cannot describe a landscape or a face. To do so would need a prodigious apparatus of names for shades and nuances, for precise particular qualities. These names do not exist, so other means have to be used.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What a prodigious growth this English race, especially the American branch of it, is having! How soon will it subdue and occupy al...l the wild parts of this continent and of the islands adjacent. No prophecy, however seemingly extravagant, as to future achievements in this way [is] likely to equal the reality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Norway, too, has noble prospects; and Lapland is remarkable for prodigious noble wild prospects. But, Sir, let me tell you, the no...blest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The analogy between baseball fans and jazz fans is closer, it seems to me, than that between other audiences. The aficionados are ...aware of and concerned with the refinements of performance and the particular kinds of poetry in both solo and ensemble performances. (A beautifully executed double steal is as elegant as a Goodman arpeggio.) Like baseball fans, jazz fans know who played where and with whom and to what effect; they talk a rarefied language and drop the names of clarinetists and percussionists as baseball fans do the names of long-forgotten (except by them) shortstops and spitballers. Their retention of detail is prodigious.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thus roving on In confus'd march forlorn, th' adventrous Bands,... With shuddring horror pale, and eyes agast View'd first thir lamentable lot, and found No rest: through many a dark and drearie Vale They pass'd, and many a Region dolorous, O'er many a Frozen, many a fierie Alpe, Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and shades of death, A Universe of death, which God by curse Created evil, for evil only good, Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds, Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, Abominable, inutterable, and worse Than Fables yet have feign'd, or fear conceiv'd, Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimeras dire.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Like dreaming, reading performs the prodigious task of carrying us off to other worlds. But reading is not dreaming because books,... unlike dreams, are subject to our will: they envelop us in alternative realities only because we give them explicit permission to do so. Books are the dreams we would most like to have, and, like dreams, they have the power to change consciousness, turning sadness to laughter and anxious introspection to the relaxed contemplation of some other time and place.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »