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Jennifer Stone
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“Love, like poetry, is a kind of homesickness, / the kind which made medieval monks / sleep in their coffins.”
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“The Irish never listen / We hear everything / But we wouldn't be caught dead / Listening.”
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“I don't think a person should take herself seriously unless she is alone.”
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“High school was great when it ended.”
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“Secrets of the heart are seldom news.”
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“It is the psychic depression of decadence which has come to this place and time. It is what happens to people who ignore their artists and deny their children. It is a terminal case of involutional melancholia which comes from within and cannot be cured by T.V. or psychotherapy or anything but a creative life, which is hard to come by in a country where it doesn't pay to do anything for yourself.”
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“Films tend to argue in favor of whatever they show.”
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“As the medieval mind blamed God for human suffering, so the modern mind blames 'the system' for the industrial blight and plague of technology.”
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“It's love and the capacity for love that distinguishes one human being from another.”
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“I grow old, I grow old, the center will not fold. In youth I had hardening of the categories and looked for the father and the mother in every lover. Then I cracked. Then I fragmented. Then the old man in my soul found the god in herself, not in some Jungian fairy tale but in the flesh that fell from the bones and the words that came into my mouth when the look went out of their eyes.”
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“Hope is a dream deferred.”
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“There are only two kinds of pain: too much love or too little.”
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“... like any Irish mother, I am scar tissue to the bone.”
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“... romance is unsatisfactory as a religion. It is no use looking for the infinite in the eyes of another.”
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“For a poet, style is the only morality.”
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“Most of us do not use speech to express thought. We use it to express feelings.”
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“In an age in which greed and lust stalk the land like some Biblical plague, it is easy to view sex as just one more thing to be had. It is the mythos of moderns.”
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“Modern man does not see himself as part of a circle of life. He has an edifice complex. He is hierarchical. He climbs the ladder of life. He sits at the top of a pyramid.”
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“One parody is worth a thousand polemics ...”
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“A new era must become literate in visual images, otherwise we will not know what we know, we will not be able to put into words the feelings aroused by images of Rambo, of Raquel Welch, or Ronald Reagan.”
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“Technology in our time is a kind of theology ... a deus ex machina whose omnipresence proves its omnipotence, deifies its voice in our lives.”
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“TV taste is an aftertaste. Whatever gets on the tube is always a foregone conclusion, a fait accompli. That is, any new ideas or social changes have already been fought for in the real world of the streets, or in the bedroom or even the law courts long before they reach the screen. By the time you see it on prime time, it's usually all over and done with, whatever it was. Television by definition is not avant garde. It is often reactionary and always sentimental.”
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“... TV shapes thought as surely as language shapes it.”
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“If it true that perception is reality, then what is shown on TV is that part of the collective consciousness known as Public Knowledge, that is, the fragment of reality which the mass of people acknowledge to be true.”
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“As art reveals the artist more than the world, so you see yourself and what you are not in the mirror of another culture.”
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“Technology evolves so much faster than wisdom.”
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“Human comedy is more profound than tragedy. In tragedy we die and it is very sad. In comedy we avoid death, and it is even sadder.”
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“... sex is like sandwiches, there has to be something in between.”
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“Integrity pays, but not in cash.”
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“... a time has come in our history when what is known has little connection with what is done.”
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“Perhaps society should give actors the same sort of protection it gives to those who follow a religious life. Actor/priest was originally the same job. The theater is left wing magic and theology is right wing magic.”
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“Misogyny is the death of the heart.”
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“Consumerism is our national religion.”
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“Greed stains our culture, soaks our sensibilities and has replaced grace as a sign of our intimacy with the divine.”
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“... movies have mirrored our moods and myths since the century began. They have taken on some of the work of religion.”
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“Just as a salesperson is never extreme or original or overdressed, so the TV retailers never do anything to distract their audiences from the real product, the commercial.”
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“All media can muddy the mind. Language leads to literature. It also leads to dogma.”
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“Most people wish to be consoled, confirmed. They want their prejudices reinforced and their structured belief systems validated. After all, it hurts to think, and it's absolute agony to think twice.”
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“The life of the city cat is short but so sophisticated.”
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“Writing poetry is like always being in love. What masochism! What luxury!”
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“Why are we poets? Because we can / not sing, that is why.”
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“Love is all there's time for.”
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“Today painting is about paint. Music is about sound. But words still cling to something very old. Like religiosity, language has its seat in the old brain, in the reptilian brain stem of early man.”
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“Love, like alcoholism, comes to a point of no return.”
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“Growing old is not a thing to watch. It cannot be forgiven in others. Alone, it can be borne. Even indulged.”
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“We do what we can. The results are none of our business.”
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“History repeats herself. ”
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“I'm accused of cleverness as if it were a sin. She is merely clever, they say.”
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“... writers who go outside the lines when they draw pictures of the world are seldom rewarded for their efforts.”
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“Trauma reflected upon in tranquility can produce morally stunning insights — literary light! It can also produce maudlin rubbish.”
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“Writing, as I experience it, means wringing out the heart/mind until it stops lying.”
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“If it's more work to read it / than it was to write it / burn it.”
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“Longing is all that lasts.”
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“... married was the loneliest I got — being without the one you're with.”
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“When I went to school, they told me literature was a rope I must use to climb out of the dark well of unknowing. Writers are the knots on the rope.”
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“... ladies are just those of us who have been silenced.”
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“I believe that while art is always beyond morality, it is never above it.”
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“The society that destroys its children is eating its own tail, committing suicide in the most perverse way.”
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“You can't make poetry out of thought; poetry is passion. Linear thought must be seduced by wild mind, by the fires of ecstasy.”
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“... if we begin on the men, there is no stopping. We must love them when we can.”
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“In all cultures, poetry and spice come into the language from the working class. The ruling class is static. The reactionary is always a prig about words. He maintains the status quo. It is in his interest to remain a cultural fundamentalist. He doesn't experiment; he has too much to lose. This is why the language of the overclass goes stale, dries up, and becomes as uptight as the psychology of such folks while the speech of working people is as fluid and changing as the sea. The only language that doesn't change is a dead language (standing water), which is why Latin is such a convenience for scientists who want to label things, who have hardening of the categories.”
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“What you say is who you are. How you say it is your style.”
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“... it takes a lot of rehearsal to become yourself.”
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“Perception is a prism, and reality is like shot silk — depends where the light hits.”
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“Opinion is the death of knowledge.”
Jennifer Stone, U.S. writer, broadcast journalist, commentator
(1933)