My criticisms are always simple; they are limited to one word:MOmit! Every syllable that can be struck out is pure profit, and eve...ry page that can be economised is a five-per-cent dividend. Nature rebels against this rule; the flesh is weak, and shrinks from the scissors; I groan in retrospect over the weak words and useless pages I have written; but the law is sound, and every book written without a superfluous page or word is a masterpiece. All the same, no one cares to apply so stern a law to another person. One has right to be severe only with oneself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The tourist is first of all an adventurer. The dream is of the pioneer, the explorer, the great voyager or the conquering emperor.... He leaves the security of home far behind and sets out beyond the perimeters of the known world for fame, fortune and excitement. He wants to take on the minotaur, scale the Matterhorn, discover a lost Amazonian tribe or sample the delights of a Thai brothel.... The essence of the tourist adventure is exhibited in the contours of the excitements that it provides. And these contours are best inferred from the stories that are told and re-told with animation to relatives, friends and colleagues at home. It is virtually never what has been seen that is recounted with enthusiasm. When the sites are described it is in the form of ritualized cliches: the Eiffel Tower really is a wonder--we went up it, and you get such a nice view. It is rather the personal moments of the tour, moments of near-crisis, that in retrospect were exciting: when one of the suitcases failed to arrive off the luggage chute at Frankfort Airport. Touring itself has been turned into a routine, restricting adventure to those moments when routine breaks down.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My own opinion is that [love] is felt most completely in marriage, or some comparable attachment of long duration. Love takes time.... What are called "love affairs" may afford a wide, and in retrospect, illuminating variety of emotions; not only fierce satisfactions and swooning delights, but the horrors of jealousy and the desperation of parting attend them; the hangover from one of these emotional riots may be long and dreadful. But rarely have the pleasures of love an opportunity to manifest themselves in such riots of passion. Love affairs are for emotional sprinters; the pleasures of love are for the emotional marathoners.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The idea of childhood as a social invention, in retrospect, is hardly credible. In the Bible, in writings of the Greeks and Romans..., and in the works of the first great educator of the modern era, Comenius, children were recognized as being both different from adults and different from one another with respect to their stages of development. To be sure, the scientific study of children and the increased length of life in modern times have enhanced our understanding of age differences, but they have always been acknowledged.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each man's genius contracts itsel...f to a very few hours.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our ideas are the offspring of our senses; we are not more able to create the form of a being we have not seen, without retrospect... to one we know, than we are able to create a new sense. He whose fancy has conceived an idea of the most beautiful form must have composed it from actual existence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The present is an age of talkers, and not of doers; and the reason is, that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in th...e Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and dote on past achievement.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Consider the relationship of Hollywood and Broadway. In the twenties, the two were sharply differentiated, movies being produced f...or the masses of the hinterland, theatre for an upper-class New York audience. The theatre was High Culture, mostly of the Academic variety (Theatre Guild) but with some spark of Avant-garde fire (the "little" or "experimental" theatre movement). The movies were definitely Mass Culture, mostly very bad but with some leaven of Avant-gardism (Griffiths, Stroheim) and Folk Art (Chaplin and other comedians). With the sound film, Broadway and Hollywood drew closer together. Plays are now produced mainly to sell the movie rights, with many being directly financed by the film companies. The merger has standardized the theatre to such an extent that even the early Theatre Guild seems vital in retrospect, while hardly a trace of the "experimental" theatre is left. And what have the movies gained? They are more sophisticated, the acting is subtler, the sets in better taste. But they too have become standardized: they are never as awful as they often were in the old days, but they are never as good either. They are better entertainment and worse art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Reporters are not paid to operate in retrospect. Because when news begins to solidify into current events and finally harden into ...history, it is the stories we didn't write, the questions we didn't ask that prove far, far more damaging than the ones we did.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You never know in retrospect whether you did or didn't do exactly the right thing, stay-at-home mothers, gone-away mothers, all of... us worry whether we should have done something differently than we did.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »