Genius is the capacity
Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and the man of talent sees two or three, plus the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art. Ezra Pound
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The universe seems to
The universe seems to me infinitely strange and foreign. At such a moment I gaze upon it with a mixture of anguish and euphoria; separate from the universe, as though placed at a certain distance outside it; I look and I see pictures, creatures that move in a kind of timeless time and spaceless space, … Read more
What happens when you
What happens when you speak colloquial Hebrew is you switch between registers all the time. So in a typical sentence, three words are biblical, one word is Russian, and one word is Yiddish. This kind of connection between very high language and very low language is very natural, people use it all the time. Etgar … Read more
People in Israel would
People in Israel would write in a high register, they wouldn’t write colloquial speech. I do a special take on colloquial speech. When I started writing, I thought [the language] was telling the story of this country: old people in a young nation, very religious, very conservative, very tight-assed, but also very anarchistic, very open-minded. … Read more
I am always behind
I am always behind the shopper at the grocery store who has stitched her coupons in the lining of her coat and wants to talk about a ‘strong’ chicken she bought two weeks ago. The register tape also runs out just before her sub-total. In the public restroom, I always stand behind the teen-ager who … Read more
Pretty much all I
Pretty much all I say politically is I encourage people to register to vote. Emmylou Harris
Taking a hypersensitive approach
Taking a hypersensitive approach to life had come to seem so much more pure and honest then joining the ranks of the numb masses who could let it all slide by. What I stopped realizing was that if you feel everything intensely, ultimately you feel nothing at all. Everything registers at the same decibel. Elizabeth … Read more
The human face is
The human face is the organic seat of beauty…. It is the register of value in development, a record of Experience, whose legitimate office is to perfect the life, a legible language to those who will study it, of the majestic mistress, the soul. Eliza Farnham
One of my favorite
One of my favorite literary theorists, Mikhail Bakhtin, wrote that the defining characteristic of the novel is its unprecedented level of \”heteroglossia\” – the way it brings together so many different registers of language. He doesn’t mean national languages, but rather the sublanguages we all navigate between every day: high language, low language, everything. I … Read more
The racist conscience of
The racist conscience of America is such that murder does not register as murder really, unless the victim is white… blacks knew that white blood is the coin of freedom in a land where for four hundred years black blood has been shed unremarked and with impunity. Eldridge Cleaver