It's a queer sensation, this secret belief that one stands on the brink of the world's greatest catastrophe. For it means the fall... of Western Europe, as it fell in the fourth century. It recurs to me every November, and culminates every December. I have to get over it as I can, and hide, for fear of being sent to an asylum.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Girls are so queer you never know what they mean. They say No when they mean Yes, and drive a man out of his wits for the fun of i...t.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men, my dear, are very queer animals, a mixture of horse- nervousness, ass-stubbornness, and camel-malice--with an angel bobbing a...bout unexpectedly like the apple in the posset, and when they can do exactly as they please, they are very hard to drive. Oh, England. Sick in head and sick in heart, Sick in whole and every part, And yet sicker thou art still For thinking that thou art not ill.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The condition that is now called gay was then called queer. The operative word was faggot and, later, pussy, but those epithets re...ally had nothing to do with the question of sexual preference: You were being told simply that you had no balls.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The little lifting helplessness, the queer Whimper-whine; whose unridiculous... Lost softness softly makes a trap for us. And makes a curse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This is a celebration of individual freedom, not of homosexuality. No government has the right to tell its citizens when or whom t...o love. The only queer people are those who don't love anybody.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For me, the principal fact of life is the free mind. For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very quee...r world we live in, a world in continuous creation and therefore continuous change and insecurity. A perpetually new and lively world, but a dangerous one, full of tragedy and injustice. A world in everlasting conflict between the new idea and the old allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old establishment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very queer world we live in, a world in continuous creation an...d therefore continuous change and insecurity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is queer to contemplate how many people there are in any community who labor under the hallucination that if one is engaged in ...any occupation different from their own, that they are just having a good time, with no possible hardships to encounter.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The field maneuvers may be different from those in Holmes's day, and the villain is more socially mobile, but since Sir Arthur we ...have not changed the three essential ingredients of the private eye. He must be a bachelor, with the bachelor's harum-scarum availability at all hours (William Powell's marriage to Myrna "Nora" Loy, a wistful concession to the family trade, fooled nobody). He must have an inconspicuous fund of curious knowledge, which in the end is always crucially relevant. He must pity the official guardians of the law. Of course, the twentieth century has grafted some interesting personality changes on the original. Holmes was an eccentric in the Victorian sense, a man with queer hobbies--cocaine was lamentable but pardonably melodramatic--whose social code was essentially that of the ruling classes. He was, in a way, the avenging squire of the underworld ready to administer a horsewhipping to the outcasts who were never privileged by birth to receive it from their fathers. Bogart is a displaced person whose present respectability is uncertain, a classless but well-contained vagabond who is not going to be questioned about where he came from or where he is going. ("I came to Casablanca for the waters." "But there are no waters in Casablanca." "I was misinformed.")LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »