For undemocratic reasons and for motives not of State, They arrive at their conclusions--largely inarticulate.... Being void of self-expression they confide their views to none; But sometimes in a smoking room, one learns why things were done.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Reverend Samuel Peters ... exaggerated the Blue Laws, but they did include "Capital Lawes" providing a death penalty for any c...hild over sixteen who was found guilty of cursing or striking his natural parents; a death penalty for an incorrigible son; a law forbidding smoking except in a room in a private house; another law declaring smoking illegal except on a journey five miles away from home,...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The knocking out of a pipe can be made almost as important as the smoking of it, especially if there are nervous people in the roo...m. A good, smart knock of a pipe against a tin wastebasket and you will have a neurasthenic out of his chair and into the window sash in no time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They lay on the broad couch, sat on the floor about the room or occupied the chairs, as pleased their fancy, smoking and discussin...g the life of New York City: the theater, Socialism, Anarchism, art, new writers, love, psychoanalysis, philosophy, death. They seemed to be searching out social themes in the life about them. Very many of them spoke of grave things in that light manner that is American, apparently never permitting their feelings to be too deeply troubled. They skimmed the surface only--perhaps too wise to be drawn beyond their depths, for it is so easy to be drawn beyond your depth in New York City.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There's a theory, one I find persuasive, that the quest for knowledge is, at bottom, the search for the answer to the question: "W...here was I before I was born." In the beginning was ... what? Perhaps, in the beginning, there was a curious room, a room like this one, crammed with wonders; and now the room and all it contains are forbidden you, although it was made just for you, had been prepared for you since time began, and you will spend all your life trying to remember it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Enormous Room seems to me to be the book that has nearest approached the mood of reckless adventure in which men will reach th...e white heat of imagination needed to fuse the soggy disjointed complexity of the industrial life about us into seething fluid of creation. There can be no more playing safe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »