If, in all the cities, every house that is past repairing could be pulled down or burned up, how great would be the crash, how hea...ven-high the conflagration. It would be a veritable crack of Doom and glare of the Judgment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, ...thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban strang...er to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and and not by a but.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The history of theater from the medieval period until the nineteenth century has been in large part a history of further and furth...er separations of the scene of dramatic action from the physical situation of the audience. Even as the subject matter--in the plays of Ibsen, Chekhov, and Strindberg--became more and more continuous with the life of the audience, the stage itself pulled in its apron, emphasized its proscenium, and became a room with an invisible fourth wall, allowing the audience to look in, while keeping it more definitely outside. The progress of film was the reverse. From the stylized and theatrical settings of the early dramas, silent films moved into greater and greater involvement with the actors. Previously the audience saw actors from a distance, with a sense of tableau and formal separation. Although they seemed to be like us, they were not: silent, hieratic, caught in frightened frenzies of comedy, tragedy, and melodrama.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We all have known Good critics, who have stamped out poet's hopes;... Good statesmen, who pulled ruin on the state; Good patriots, who, for a theory, risked a cause; Good kings, who disembowelled for a tax; Good Popes, who brought all good to jeopardy; Good Christians, who sat still in easy-chairs; And damned the general world for standing up.-- Now, may the good God pardon all good men!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Such writing is a sort of mental masturbation.... I don't mean that he is indecent but viciously soliciting his own ideas into a s...tate which is neither poetry nor anything else but a Bedlam vision produced by raw pork and opium.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
FROM his shoulder Hiawatha Took the camera of rosewood,... Made of sliding, folding rosewood; Neatly put it all together. In its case it lay compactly, Folded into nearly nothing; But he opened out the hinges, Pushed and pulled the joints and hinges, Till it looked all squares and oblongs, Like a complicated figure In the second book of Euclid. This he perched upon a tripod-- Crouched beneath its dusky cover-- Stretched his hand, enforcing silence-- Said "Be motionless, I beg you!" Mystic, awful was the process. All the family in order Sat before him for their pictures: Each in turn as he was taken, Volunteered his own suggestions, His ingenious suggestions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get ver...y cute with; the one that really bothers them is the murder somebody only thought of two minutes before he pulled it off.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »