For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not f...or the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible. Our science has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate meaning, forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, and noise of beast. Noise bought, sold, or prohibited. Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise.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 »
The instincts of the ant are very unimportant, considered as the ant's; but the moment a ray of relation is seen to extend from it... to man, and the little drudge is seen to be a monitor, a little body with a mighty heart, then all its habits, even that said to be recently observed, that it never sleeps, become sublime.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And there was that wholesale libel on a Yale prom. If all the girls attending it were laid end to end, Mrs. Parker said, she would...n't be at all surprised.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you'd ne...ver know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The proud person rationalizes his faults, since to acknowledge them would threaten his sense of superiority. The humble person, on... the other hand, readily admits guilt and patiently listens to the reproofs and anger even of his enemies. Our enemies do not seek to protect our self-image with falsehoods and often monitor our behavior more accurately than does many a friend. Therefore, our enemies' admonishments are often of greater value to us in exposing our faults than are the kind and soothing words of a friend.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I've begun to appreciate the generational patterns that ripple out from our lives like stones dropped in water, pulsing outward ev...en after we are gone. Although we have but one childhood, we relive it first through our children's and then our grandchildren's eyes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is indeed typical that you Earth people refuse to believe in the superiority of any world but your own. Children looking into a... magnifying glass, imagining the image you see is the image of your true size.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »