Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism's... high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.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 »
There are two kinds of liberalism. A liberalism which is always, subterraneously authoritative and paternalistic, on the side of o...ne's good conscience. And then there is a liberalism which is more ethical than political; one would have to find another name for this. Something like a profound suspension of judgment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him..., what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism. All this stuff you read about men yelling and screaming, beating against the bars, running spoons along them, guards rushing in with clubs--all that is for the big house. A good jail is one of the quietest places in the world.... Life in jail is in suspension.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If the oarsmen of a fast-moving ship suddenly cease to row, the suspension of the driving force of the oars doesn't prevent the ve...ssel from continuing to move on its course. And with a speech it is much the same. After he has finished reciting the document, the speaker will still be able to maintain the same tone without a break, borrowing its momentum and impulse from the passage he has just read out.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is tro...ubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Leonid Ivanovich Shigaev is dead.... The suspension dots, customary in Russian obituaries, must represent the footprints of words ...that have departed on tiptoe, in reverent single file, leaving their tracks on the marble....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »