Do you believe that the dead can influence the living?... Could you conceive of a superhuman mentality influencing someone from th...e other side of death?... There is such a one.... Someone, something that reaches out from beyond the grave and fills me with horrible impulses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There would have to be something wrong with someone who could throw out a child's first Valentine card saying, "I love you, Mommy...."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that's what people observe. You... see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw. It's just extraordinary that we should have been given these peculiarities.... Something is ironic in the world and it has to do with the fact that what you intend never comes out like you intend it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fa...ct she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention--on a landsca...pe, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God--that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying.... The primary task of the schoolteacher is to teach children, in a secular context, the technique of prayer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is something to be said for losing one's possessions, after nothing can be done about it. I had loved my Nanking home and th...e little treasures it had contained, the lovely garden I had made, my life with friends and students. Well, that was over. I had nothing at all now except the old clothes I stood in. I should have felt sad, and I was quite shocked to realize that I did not feel sad at all. On the contrary, I had a lively sense of adventure merely at being alive and free, even of possessions. No one expected anything of me. I had no obligations, no duties, no tasks. I was nothing but a refugee, someone totally different from the busy young woman I had been.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But [Jonas] quickly understood that a disciple was not necessarily someone who wishes to learn something. More often, on the contr...ary, one became a disciple for the unselfish pleasure of teaching one's master.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to rese...nt someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The language of the game is interesting. You can think of the pauses as caesuras, breaks between the lines. As a poem the game is ...composed of a number of short lines representing the pitches. The number of lines per batter form a stanza. Then there is a space. Sometimes the stanzas become breathless, rushing full paragraphs that build rapidly on each other until the poem-inning explodes. The poem lives for this sudden blossoming out of prosodic regularity. Should someone make a computer analysis of baseball prosody, I believe that they would come up with something close to the prosody of some great American lyrical epic, Whitman's Leaves of Grass, let's say, or Doc Williams's Patterson.... The game is definitely an epic ... formed of many lyrical moments dependent on silences for their effectiveness. An unfolding story punctuated by brief emotional swellings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You'd have to be a jew like me to understand. You've heard of the Pale. Every one of us has something fenced up way down in us. We...'ve been in prison for two thousand years. I have the mind of a jailbird, that's why prison can't hurt me. That's why we throw ourselves into every movement of freedom. That's why I feel the slavery of the workers, I feel it as a worker and I feel it as a jew. Oh you can't imagine the overheated stuffiness of life at home on the East Side when I was a kid. We were all jailed in poverty and Judaism and in old customs and hatreds and wornout laws.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »