The superficiality of the American is the result of his hustling. It needs leisure to think things out; it needs leisure to mature.... People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
During those years in Stamps, I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare. He was my first white love.... it was Shakespeare w...ho said, "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes." It was a state of mind with which I found myself most familiar. I pacified myself about his whiteness by saying that after all he had been dead so long it couldn't matter to anyone any more.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The close-up has no equivalent in a narrative fashioned of words. Literature is totally lacking in any working method to enable it... to isolate a single vastly enlarged detail in which one face comes forward to underline a state of mind or stress the importance of a single detail in comparison with the rest. As a narrative device, the ability to vary the distance between the camera and the object may be a small thing indeed, but it makes for a notable difference between cinema and oral or written narrative, in which the distance between language and image is always the same.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Feminism, like Boston, is a state of mind. It is the state of mind of women who realize that their whole position in the social or...der is antiquated, as a woman cooking over an open fire with heavy iron pots would know that her entire housekeeping was out of date.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles ... but there is one order of beauty... which seems made to turn the heads not only of men, but of all intelligent mammals, even of women. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle and to engage in conscious mischief--a beauty with which you can never be angry, but that you feel ready to crush for inability to comprehend the state of mind into which it throws you.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you're anxious for to shine in the high esthetic line as a man of culture rare,... You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms, and plant them everywhere. You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases of your complicated state of mind, The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter of a transcendental kind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Melancholy has ceased to be an individual phenomenon, an exception. It has become the class privilege of the wage earner, a mass s...tate of mind that finds its cause wherever life is governed by production quotas.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am surprised you shd. say fancy and aesthetic tastes have led me to my present state of mind: these wd. be better satisfied in t...he Church of England, for bad taste is always meeting one in the accessories of Catholicism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This fantastic state of mind, of a humanity that has outrun its ideas, is matched by a political scene in the grotesque style, wit...h Salvation Army methods, hallelujahs and bell-ringing and dervishlike repetition of monotonous catchwords, until everybody foams at the mouth. Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstacy, politics becomes an opiate for the masses, a proletarian eschatology; and reason veils her face.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As for the peasant populations of a great part of the world, they aren't so much anxious as hungry. They aren't anxious about whet...her they will get a salary raise, or which of the three colleges of their choice they will be admitted to, or whether to buy a Ford or Cadillac, or whether the kind of TV set they want is too expensive. They are hungry, cold and, in many parts of the world, they dread that local warfare, bandits, political coups may endanger their homes, their meager livelihoods and their lives. But surely they are not anxious. For anxiety, as we have come to use it to describe our characteristic state of mind, can be contrasted with the active fear of hunger, loss, violence and death. Anxiety is the appropriate emotion when the immediate personal terror--of a volcano, an arrow, the sorcerer's spell, a stab in the back and other calamities, all directed against one's self--disappears.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »