The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and ...deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and Shelley's poetry is not entirely sane either. The Shelley of actual life... is a vision of beauty and radiance, indeed, but availing nothing, effecting nothing. And in poetry, no less than in life, he is "a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Drawing is a struggle between nature and the artist, in which the better the artist understands the intentions of nature, the more... easily he will triumph over it. For him it is not a question of copying, but of interpreting in a simpler and more luminous language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over... all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whoever today speaks of human existence in terms of power, efficiency, and "historical tasks" ... is an actual or potential assass...in.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectr...al throat?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is most appalling in an F. Scott Fitzgerald book is that it is peopleless fiction: Fitzgerald writes about spectral, muscled ...suits; dresses, hats, and sleeves which have some sort of vague, libidinous throb. These are plainly the product of sickness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »