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 »
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean,--roll! Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;... Man marks the earth with ruin,--his control Stops with the shore;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 »
Obviously, where art has it over life is in the matter of editing. Life can be seen to suffer from a drastic lack of editing. It s...tops too quick, or else it goes on too long. Worse, its pacing is erratic. Some chapters are little more than a few sentences in length, while others stretch into volumes. Life, for all its raw talent, has little sense of structure. It creates amazing textures, but it can't be counted on for snappy beginnings or good endings either. Indeed, in many cases no ending is provided at all. The kind of work that Maxwell Perkins did for Thomas Wolfe, or more recently, that Verna Fields did for Stephen Spielberg, doesn't get done in life. Even in a literary age like the nineteenth century it never occurred to anyone to posit God as Editor, useful as the metaphor might have been.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 »
It was a flourishing tropic he required For his refreshment, an abundant zone,... Prickly and obdurate, dense, harmonious, Yet with a harmony not rarefied Nor fined for the inhibited instruments Of over-civil stops.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The action of the soul is oftener in that which is felt and left unsaid, than in that which is said in any conversation. It broods... over every society, and they unconsciously seek for it in each other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »