When the typewriter stops in a New York office everybody's embarrassed; men start to quarrel or to make love to the stenographer o...r drop lighted cigarettes in the wastebasket.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There's a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most p...eople go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Hope" is the thing with feathers-- That perches in the soul--... And sings the tunes without the words-- And never stops--at all--LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to "realize" myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to ha...ve "succeeded" this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is "realizable." Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence. The mounting of this illusi...on defines the purpose and accounts for the immense wealth of American sports. It is the ceremony of innocence that the fans pay to see--not the game or the match or the bout, but the ritual portrayal of a world in which time stops and all hope remains plausible, in which everybody present can recover the blameless expectations of a child, where the forces of light always triumph over the powers of darkness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me ...>from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A solitary traveller can sleep from state to state, from day to night, from day to day, in the long womb of its controlled interio...r. It is the cradle that never stops rocking after the lullaby is over. It is the biggest sleeping tablet in the world, and no one need ever swallow the pill, for it swallows them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begi...n to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The secret affinity between gambling and the desert: the intensity of gambling reinforced by the presence of the desert all around... the town. The air-conditioned freshness of the gaming rooms, as against the radiant heat outside. The challenge of all the artificial lights to the violence of the sun's rays. Night of gambling sunlit on all sides; the glittering darkness of these rooms in the middle of the desert. Gambling itself is a desert form, inhuman, uncultured, initiatory, a challenge to the natural economy of value, a crazed activity on the fringes of exchange. But it too has a strict limit and stops abruptly; its boundaries are exact, its passion knows no confusion. Neither the desert nor gambling are open areas; their spaces are finite and concentric, increasing in intensity toward the interior, toward a central point, be it the spirit of gambling or the heart of the desert--a privileged, immemorial space, where things lose their shadow, where money loses its value, and where the extreme rarity of traces of what signals to us there leads men to seek the instantaneity of wealth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sunday morning may be cheery enough, with its extra cup of coffee and litter of Sunday newspapers, but there is always hanging ove...r it the ominous threat of 3 P.M., when the sun gets around to the back windows and life stops dead in its tracks.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »