Most people aren't appreciated enough, and the bravest things we do in our lives are usually known only to ourselves. No one throw...s ticker tape on the man who chose to be faithful to his wife, on the lawyer who didn't take the drug money, or the daughter who held her tongue again and again. All this anonymous heroism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I could buy one Tape and get another free. I accept- Ed the deal, paid for one tape and... Chose a free one. But since I've been Repeatedly billed for my free tape.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One should speak of television's cold light, and why it is inoffensive to the imagination (including the imagination of children).... It is innocuous because it no longer conveys an imaginary, for the simple reason that it is no longer an image. Here it contrasts with the cinema which (though increasingly contaminated by television) is still endowed with an intense imaginary--because it is an image. This is not simply to speak of film as a mere screen or visual form, but as a myth, something that still resembles a double, a mirror, a fantasy, a dream, etc. None of this is in the TV image. It doesn't suggest anything, it mesmerizes.... It is only a screen or, better, it is a miniaturized terminal that immediately appears in your head (you are the screen and the television is watching you), transistorizes all your neurons and passes for a magnetic tape--a tape, not an image.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of m...easuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Listening to someone talk isn't at all like listening to their words played over on a machine. What you hear when you have a face ...before you is never what you hear when you have before you a winding tape.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I spent my life mixin' with your breed, and I don't like it. Get me. You can hide behind a lot of red tape, crooked lawyers and po...liticians with the gimmes, writs of habeas corpus, witnesses that don't remember overnight, but we'll get through to you, just like we got all the rest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The man who will follow precedent, but never create one, is merely an obvious example of the routineer. You find him desperately n...umerous in the civil service, in the official bureaus. To him government is something given as unconditionally, as absolutely as ocean or hill. He goes on winding the tape that he finds. His imagination has rarely extricated itself from under the administrative machine to gain any sense of what a human, temporary contraption the whole affair is. What he thinks is the heavens above him is nothing but the roof.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparen...ts' memories on special occasions perhaps--no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »