... no book ... ever competed with the Bible. The story of Ruth was better than Ramona, and the poetry of Job was better than Long...fellow. I still have my first big Bible, carefully underlined through with red and black ink, and interleafed [sic] with painfully written manuscript pages.... Margery and I earned our five cents a week for church and a penny for Sunday school by learning three verses of the Bible a day and six on Sunday. We learned dozens and dozens of chapters. I supposed "Evangeline" and "Hiawatha" were better poetry, but I didn't like them so well.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In short, camp mocks bad taste; kitsch exploits it. Camp arouses our sense of the ridiculous and we respond with amused tolerance.... When we see Bette Davis or Ruth Gordon, fine if sometimes flamboyant performers, relax their self-discipline and overextend their acting technique in a superfluity of ineffective gestures--finger-twitching and hip-switching, hand-rubbing or hip-protruding--we label the sum total as camp. Mae West, whose nasally provocative delivery, eye-rolling, lip-pursing, and pelvic tics parody the conventional invitation to dalliance, is never out of control and is camp, pure and simple.... Camp was also the stock-in-trade of Carmen Miranda, whose retina-searing Technicolor get-ups, skyscraper headdresses bearing a season's fruit harvest, clomping platform shoes and garbled English projected in a voice that could be heard on Mars all came together beautifully in her campy personification of Exaggeration. Had we been blessed with the Brazilian Bombshell's own blazing interpretation of Joan of Arc, the grotesque, if fascinating, result would surely have been kitsch.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I'll come up the steps to the house and the gardener will be clipping away at the hedges and he'll say, "Good evening, Mr. Younger...." And I'll say, "Hello, Jefferson, how are you this evening?" And I'll go inside and Ruth will come downstairs and meet me at the door and we'll kiss each other and she'll take my arm and we'll go up to your room to see you sitting on the floor with the catalogues of all the great schools in America around you.... All the great schools in the world! And--and I'll say, all right son--it's your seventeenth birthday, what is it you've decided?... Just tell me, what it is you want to be--and you'll be it.... Whatever you want to be--Yessir! You just name it, so ... and I hand you the world!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Here did she fall a tear. Here in this place I'll set a bank of rue, sour herb-of-grace.... Rue even for ruth here shortly shall be seen In the remembrance of a weeping queen.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The adequate study of culture, our own and those on the opposite side of the globe, can press on to fulfillment only as we learn t...oday from the humanities as well as from the scientists.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... oh, I long to prove myself by writing! The best seems to die in me when I give it up. It is the self I love--not this efficien...t, philanthropic self.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our national experience in Americanizing millions of Europeans whose chief wish was to become Americans has been a heady wine whic...h has made us believe, as perhaps no nation before us has ever believed, that, given the slimmest chance, all peoples will pattern themselves upon our model.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have not the motive to prepare ourselves for a "life-work" of teaching, of social work--we know that we would lay it down with ...hallelujah in the height of our success, to make a home for the right man. And all the time in the background of our consciousness rings the warning that perhaps the right man will never come. A great love is given to very few. Perhaps this make-shift time filler of a job is our life work after all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The happiest excitement in life is to be convinced that one is fighting for all one is worth on behalf of some clearly seen and de...eply felt good, and against some greatly scorned evil.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The mere fact of leaving ultimate social control in the hands of the people has not guaranteed that men will be able to conduct th...eir lives as free men. Those societies where men know they are free are often democracies, but sometimes they have strong chiefs and kings. ... they have, however, one common characteristic: they are all alike in making certain freedoms common to all citizens, and inalienable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »