I am an invisible man.... I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids--and I might even be said to possess a min...d. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And when we can with Meeter safe, We'll call him so, if not plain Ralph,... For Rhime the Rudder is of Verses, With which like Ships they steer their courses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whatever else it may be--stimulus, tranquilizer, aural nipple, too of executives, Muzak is basically trivializing. It is not simpl...y that it relegates music to the province of wallpaper. Background music never need be banal. When it is used in support of drama, it can greatly enhance without harming itself. Mozart was entirely amenable to such films as Elvira Madigan and The French Lieutenant's Woman; Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote aptly for The Invaders, Arnold Bax for Oliver Twist, Sergei Prokofiev for Lieutenant Kije and Alexander Nevsky, Dmitri Shostakovich for others. In such uses, music collaborates with artists, it becomes an art among arts. But Muzak collaborates chiefly with management: it is used as an aural smoke-screen, a form of jamming, a hormone in the henhouse, an emollient in cemeteries.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For character, to prepare for the inevitable I recommend selections from [Ralph Waldo] Emerson. His writings have done for me far ...more than all other reading.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Of course I'm a black writer.... I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American wr...iter aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call "literature" is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hassidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Emerson said that the "scholar is man thinking." Had Southerners of that era taken seriously the famous lecture entitled "The Amer...ican Scholar," they might have replied by saying that the gentleman is man talking. The accomplished Christian gentleman of the old South was the shadow, attenuated by evangelical Calvinism, of his Renaissance spiritual ancestor, who had been the creation of the rhetorical tradition, out of Aristotle through Cicero distilled finally by Castiglione. By contrast, the New England sage, embodied in Ralph Waldo Emerson, took seriously what has come to be known since the Industrial Revolution as the life of the mind: an activity a little apart from life, and perhaps leading to the fashionable alienation of the "intellectual" of our time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I started out as a nurse I did so with the highest ideals.... But I found that steady work in my profession--like every woman...'s work in the world--depended upon the giving of myself.... Two-thirds of the physicians I met made a nurse's virtue the price of their influence in getting her steady work. Is it any wonder that I determined to become a member of this privileged sex, if possible?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Think of the better world we could build if men and women, if even for a little while longer, were freed from their greatest fear:... the fear of death and the grave.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »