You will recall the proud statement made recently by a Fascist general--"We have four columns in front of Madrid and a fifth insid...e the city."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give f...orth its spark.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The general feeling was, and for a long time remained, that one had several children in order to keep just a few. As late as the s...eventeenth century . . . people could not allow themselves to become too attached to something that was regarded as a probable loss. This is the reason for certain remarks which shock our present-day sensibility, such as Montaigne's observation, "I have lost two or three children in their infancy, not without regret, but without great sorrow."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I cannot accept the doctrine that in poetry there is a "suspension of belief." A poet must never make a statement simply because i...t is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally ...apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the same room with me, does or can possibly hold it to be compellingly true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »