I suppose the fact is that no friendship can stand the breakfast test.... Civilisation has done away with curl-papers, yet at that... hour the soul of the Hausfrau is as tightly screwed up in them as was ever her grandmother's hair, and though my body comes down mechanically, having been trained that way by punctual parents, my soul never thinks of beginning to wake up for other people till lunch-time, and never does so completely till it has been taken out of doors and aired in the sunshine. Who can begin conventional amiability the first thing in the morning? It is the hour of savage instincts and natural tendencies; it is the triumph of the Disagreeable and the Cross. I am convinced that the Muses and the Graces never thought of having breakfast anywhere but in bed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure predict...ion fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Japan gets the most of ordinary people by organizing them to adapt and succeed. America, by getting out of their way so that they ...can adjust individually, allows them to succeed. It is not that Japan has no individualists and America no organizations, but the thrusts of the societies are different. Japan has distorted its economy and depressed its living standard in order to keep its job structure and social values as steady as possible. At the government's direction, the entire economy has tried to flex almost as one, in response to the ever-changing world. The country often seems like a family that becomes more tightly bound together when it must withstand war, emigration, or some other upheaval. America's strength is the opposite: it opens its doors and brings the world's disorder in. It tolerates social change that would tear most other countries apart. The openness encourages Americans to adapt as individuals rather than as a group.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Guided by emotion and empathy, working through ritual and repetition, television's core vocabulary reflects its role as a therapeu...tic voice ministering to the open wounds of the psyche. As a "close-up" medium whose dramatic and social locus is the home, television addresses the inner life by minimizing the heroic while maximizing the private and personal aspects of existence. Where motion pictures favor the panoramic shot, tele vision privileges the zoom shot, looking in rather than out. To represent conversation, film directors use the "shot-counter-shot" effect while television directors employ the tightly constructed "two faces east." Thus motion-picture conversation emphasizes the separations between people, while television depicts people as closely linked to one another.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An orange grown in Florida usually has a thin and tightly fitting skin, and it is also heavy with juice. Californians say that if ...you want to eat a Florida orange you have to get into a bathtub first. California oranges are light in weight and have thick skins that break easily and come off in hunks. The flesh inside is marvelously sweet, and the segments almost separate themselves. In Florida, it is said that you can run over a California orange with a ten-ton truck and not even wet the pavement.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The essence of a sound style is that it cannot be reduced to rules--that it is a living and breathing thing with something of the ...devilish in it--that it fits its proprietor tightly yet ever so loosely, as his skin fits him. It is, in fact, quite as seriously an integral part of him as that skin is. It hardens as his arteries harden. It has Katzenjammer on the days succeeding his indiscretions. It is gaudy when he is young and gathers decorum as he grows old. On the day after he makes a mash on a new girl it glows and glitters. If he has fed well, it is mellow. If he has gastritis it is bitter. In brief, a style is always the outward and visible symbol of a man, and cannot be anything else. To attempt to teach it is as silly as to set up courses in making love. The man who makes love out of a book is not making love at all; he is simply imitating someone else making love. God help him if, in love or literary composition, his preceptor be a pedagogue!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Shackled heart, free spirit.--Whoever binds his heart tightly and imprisons it may indulge his spirit in many liberties: I have al...ready said that once. But no one believes me unless he already knows.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »