Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth, And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings ...... And while with silent lifting mind I've trod The high, untrespassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand and touched the face of God.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The moon is a white strange world, great, white, soft-seeming globe in the night sky, and what she actually communicates to me acr...oss space I shall never fully know. But the moon that pulls the tides, and the moon that controls the menstrual periods of women, and the moon that touches the lunatics, she is not the mere dead lump of the astronomist.... When we describe the moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Money talks" because money is a metaphor, a transfer, and a bridge. Like words and language, money is a storehouse of communally ...achieved work, skill, and experience. Money, however, is also a specialist technology like writing; and as writing intensifies the visual aspect of speech and order, and as the clock visually separates time from space, so money separates work from the other social functions. Even today money is a language for translating the work of the farmer into the work of the barber, doctor, engineer, or plumber. As a vast social metaphor, bridge, or translator, money--like writing--speeds up exchange and tightens the bonds of interdependence in any community. It gives great spatial expansion and control to political organizations, just as writing does, or the calendar.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have the pleasures suitable to our lot; let us not usurp those of greatness. Ours are more natural and all the more solid and s...ure for being humbler. Since we will not do so out of conscience, at least out of ambition let us reject ambition.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One sticks to an opinion because he prides himself on having come to it on his own, and another because he has taken great pains t...o learn it and is proud to have grasped it: and so both do so out of vanity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Both classically- and romantically-minded spirits--inasmuch as these two species always exist--occupy themselves with a vision of ...the future: but the former do so out of a strength of their age, the latter out of its weakness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I can grouse about the food, and the C.O. and anything I blame please. And that's more than you with your Gestapo and your storm t...roopers and your Aryan bourgeois. Ahhh, nuts. What's the good of talking to you. You can't even begin to understand democracy. We own the right to be fed up with anything we damn please and say so out loud when we feel like it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thus a man shall lead his life away here on the edge of the wilderness, on Indian Millinocket Stream, in a new world, far in the d...ark of a continent, and have a flute to play at evening here, while his strains echo to the stars, amid the howling of wolves; shall live, as it were, in the primitive age of the world, a primitive man. Yet he shall spend a sunny day, and in this century be my contemporary; perchance shall read some scattered leaves of literature, and sometimes talk with me. Why read history, then, if the ages and the generations are now? He lives three thousand years deep into time, an age not yet described by poets. Can you well go further back in history than this? Ay! ay!--for there turns up but now into the mouth of Millinocket Stream a still more ancient and primitive man, whose history is not brought down even to the former. In a bark vessel sewn with the roots of the spruce, with hornbeam paddles, he dips his way along. He is but dim and misty to me, obscured by the æons that lie between the bark canoe and the batteau. He builds no house of logs, but a wigwam of skins. He eats no hot bread and sweet cake, but musquash and moose meat and the fat of bears. He glides up the Millinocket and is lost to my sight, as a more distant and misty cloud is seen flitting by behind a nearer, and is lost in space. So he goes about his destiny, the red face of man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's alive and waiting for you. Ready to kill you if you go too far. The sun will get you, or the cold at night. A thousand ways t...he desert can kill.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Analogies between the stage and the screen assume that they deal with the same material. But they don't. The material of the scree...n is not actual objects but images fixed on the film. And the very fact that they have their being on film endows these images with properties which are never found in actual objects. For instance, on the stage the actor moves in real space and time. He cannot even cross the room without performing a definite number of movements. On the screen an action may be shown only in terminal points with all its intervening moments left out. Similarly, in watching a performance on the stage the spectator is governed by the actual conditions of space and time. Not so in the case of the movie spectator. Thanks to the moving camera he is able to view the scene from all kinds of angles, leaping from a long-distance view to a close-range inspection of every detail. It is obvious that with this extraordinary power of handling space and time--by elimination and emphasis, according to its dramatic needs--the motion picture can never be content with modeling itself after the stage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »