Every European visitor to the United States is struck by the comparative rarity of what he would call a face, by the frequency of ...men and women who look like elderly babies. If he stays in the States for any length of time, he will learn that this cannot be put down to a lack of sensibility--the American feels the joys and sufferings of human life as keenly as anybody else. The only plausible explanation I can find lies in his different attitude to the past. To have a face, in the European sense of the word, it would seem that one must not only enjoy and suffer but also desire to preserve the memory of even the most humiliating and unpleasant experiences of the past.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The frequency of personal questions grows in direct proportion to your increasing girth. . . . No one would ask a man such a perso...nally invasive question as "Is your wife having natural childbirth or is she planning to be knocked out?" But someone might ask that of you. No matter how much you wish for privacy, your pregnancy is a public event to which everyone feels invited.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Dr. Scofield's equipment, which you have just seen, radiated waves direct to Professor Houghland's laboratory. When these waves ca...me in contact with those the professor's equipment was radiating, they created the interstellar frequency, which is the death ray.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We me...et at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war. We meet at the post-office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications. Consider the girls in a factory,--never alone, hardly in their dreams. It would be better if there were but one inhabitant to a square mile, as where I live. The value of a man is not in his skin, that we should touch him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One is apt to be discouraged by the frequency with which Mr. Hardy has persuaded himself that a macabre subject is a poem in itsel...f; that, if there be enough of death and the tomb in one's theme, it needs no translation into art, the bold statement of it being sufficient.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »