The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail ...and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The comic imagination deals in miraculous transformations and instantaneous casting-off of burdens and sufferings. It releases sud...den floods of feelings and allows the purging of enmity in play. The comic sense can cause a sensation of wholeness and integrity of being, though one that is almost brief and passing. When we are in a festive mood and laughing, we seem to go out of our normally anxious, reflective selves into a different phase of being, and the comic flow within us dissolves our sense of limitation. Time stands still, and we feel ourselves to be the center of life. Mirth so intensifies the moment that it could be described as sanctifying life by the sheer unself-conscious vitality that it stimulates within us. No wonder, then, that the act of laughter and the surge of comic joy in a death-haunted, misery-prone creature could be, and sometimes has been, seen and felt as a natural intrusion of the miraculous into the self--as, that is, a religious experience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Take a woman talking, purging herself with rhymes,... drumming words out like a typewriter, planting words in you like grass seed. You'll move off.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The satirical rogue says here that old men have grey beards, that their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber ... />and plum-tree gum, and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with most weak hams.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are few books which are fit to be remembered in our wisest hours, but the Iliad is brightest in the serenest days, and embod...ies still all the sunlight that fell on Asia Minor. No modern joy or ecstasy of ours can lower its height or dim its lustre, but there it lies in the east of literature, as it were the earliest and latest production of the mind. The ruins of Egypt oppress and stifle us with their dust, foulness preserved in cassia and pitch, and swathed in linen; the death of that which never lived. But the rays of Greek poetry struggle down to us, and mingle with the sunbeams of the recent day. The statue of Memnon is cast down, but the shaft of the Iliad still meets the sun in his rising.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »