Just as the mother's womb holds us for ten months not in preparation for itself but for the region to which we seem to be discharg...ed when we are capable of drawing breath and surviving in the open, so in the span extending from infancy to old age we are ripening for another birth. Another beginning awaits us, another status. We cannot yet bear heaven's light except at intervals; look unfalteringly, then, to that decisive hour which is the body's last but not the soul's. All that lies about you look upon as the luggage in a posting station; you must push on. At your departure Nature strips you as bare as at your entry. You cannot carry out more than you brought in; indeed, you must lay down a good part of what you brought into life. The envelope of skin, which is your last covering, will be stripped off; the flesh and the blood which is diffused and courses through the whole of it will be stripped off; the bones and sinews which are the structural support of the shapeless and precarious mass will be stripped off. That day which you dread as the end is your birth into eternity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People who begin sentences with "I may be old-fashioned but--" are usually not only old-fashioned but wrong. I never thought the t...ime would come when I should catch myself leading off with that crack. But I feel it coming on right now.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Medusa, come, we'll turn him into stone," they shouted all together glaring down, "how wrong we were to let off Theseus lightly!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The man who invented Eskimo Pie made a million dollars, so one is told, but E.E. Cummings, whose verse has been appearing off and ...on for three years now, and whose experiments should not be more appalling to those interested in poetry than the experiment of surrounding ice-cream with a layer of chocolate was to those interested in soda fountains, has hardly made a dent in the doughy minds of our so-called poetry lovers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched seabeams glitter in the da...rk near the Tennhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is no great religious leader--from the Buddha to Moses to Jesus to Mohammed to Luther--who offered people what they want. On...ly what they need. But television is not well-suited to offering people what they need. It is "user friendly." It is too easy to turn off. It is at its most alluring when it speaks the language of dynamic visual imagery. It does not accommodate complex language or stringent demands. As a consequence, what is preached on television is not anything like the Sermon on the Mount. Religious programs are filled with good cheer. They celebrate affluence. Their featured players become celebrities. Though their messages are trivial, the shows have high ratings, or rather, because their messages are trivial, the shows have high ratings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »