The shadow of the Venetian blind on the painted wall, Shadows of the snake-plant and cacti, the plaster animals,... Focus the tragic melancholy of the bright stare Into nowhere, a hole like the black holes in space.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If the family were a container, it would be a nest, an enduring nest, loosely woven, expansive, and open. If the family were a fru...it, it would be an orange, a circle of sections, held together but separable--each segment distinct. If the family were a boat, it would be a canoe that makes no progress unless everyone paddles. If the family were a sport, it would be baseball: a long, slow, nonviolent game that is never over until the last out. If the family were a building, it would be an old but solid structure that contains human history, and appeals to those who see the carved moldings under all the plaster, the wide plank floors under the linoleum, the possibilities.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Christos-image is most difficult to disentangle... from its art-craft junk-shop paint-and-plaster medieval jumble of pain-worship and death-symbol.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pu...lp, disgraced by Goebbels and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too, But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;... And if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints, Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a sto...ry.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban m...asses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is no necessary connection between the important events of a life and the records of it that have been preserved in memory, ...in documents, in memorials, or in living testimony. The biographer must compose his life of what he has, just as the archeologist must restore his temple or his statue with such fragments as thieving time and careless men have left him; but fate often ironically leaves him a well-preserved leg and a dismembered torso, while the head, which would supply the main clue to the body, is missing. Hence, in addition to the purposive selection exercised by the subject himself and by the biographer in making use of such materials as are left, there exists a purely external selection dominated by chance, which cuts across the evidence in an arbitrary fashion. To correct for such distortions the biographer must be an anatomist of character: he must be able to restore the missing nose in plaster, even if he does not find the original marble.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »