Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph....... Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not possible, for a poet, writing in any language, to protect himself from the tragic elements in human life.... [ellipsis i...n source] Illness, old age, and death--subjects as ancient as humanity--these are the subjects that the poet must speak of very nearly from the first moment that he begins to speak.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The "family" has clearly emerged anew in the late 1970s as a central subject for discussion, debate, research and writing in both ...scholarly and popular arenas. Anxiety over whether or not the family as a basic social institution is dying has diminished. In its stead has emerged a fairly broad consensus around the position that the family is "here to stay," but that it certainly is changing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is nothing on earth more exquisite than a bonny book, with well-placed columns of rich black writing in beautiful borders, a...nd illuminated pictures cunningly inset. But nowadays, instead of looking at books, people read them. A book might as well be one of those orders for bacon and bran.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Twist was a guided missile, launched from the ghetto into the very heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religi...on, and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Speech is after all only a system of gestures, having the peculiarity that each gesture produces a characteristic sound, so that i...t can be perceived through the ear as well as through the eye. Listening to a speaker instead of looking at him tends to make us think of speech as essentially a system of sounds; but it is not; essentially it is a system of gestures made with the lungs and larynx, and the cavities of the mouth and nose. We get still farther away from the fundamental facts about speech when we think of it as something that can be written and read, forgetting that what writing, in our clumsy notations, can represent is only a small part of the spoken sound, where pitch and stress, tempo and rhythm, are almost entirely ignored. But even a writer or reader, unless the words are to fall flat or meaningless, must speak them soundlessly to himself. The written or printed book is only a series of hints, as elliptical as the neumes of Byzantine music, from which the reader thus works out for himself the speech-gestures which alone have the gift of expression.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, read...ing and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public exp...lains the reason why.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You have for company the best companion you will ever have--the modest, defeated, plodding workaday self which has a name and can ...be identified in public registers in case of accident or death. But the real self, the one who has taken over the reins, is almost a stranger. He is the one who is filled with ideas; he is the one who is writing in the air; he is the one who, if you become too fascinated with his exploits, will finally expropriate the old, worn-out self, taking over your name, your address, your wife, your past, your future.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Both Hopkins and Lawrence were religious not just in the ritualistic sense but in the sense of being obsessed with the word--the w...ord made life and truth--with the need to invent a language as direct as religious utterance. Both were poets, but outside the literary fashions of their time. Both felt that among the poets of their time was an absorption in literary manners, fashions and techniques which separated the line of the writing from that of religious truth. Both felt that the modern situation imposed on them the necessity to express truth by means of a different kind of poetic writing from that used in past or present. Both found themselves driven into writing in a way which their contemporaries did not understand or respond to yet was inevitable to each in his pursuit of truth. Here of course there is a difference between Hopkins and Lawrence, because Hopkins in his art was perhaps over-worried, over-conscientious, whereas Lawrence was an instinctive poet who, in his concern for truth, understood little of the problems of poetic form, although he held strong views about them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »