Two Quotes (page 54)
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I thought of you and how you love this beauty, And walking up the long beach all alone. I heard the waves breaking in measured thunder. As you and I once heard their monotone. Around me were the echoing dunes, beyond me. The cold and sparkling silver of the sea --We two will pass through death and ages lengthen. Before you hear that sound again with me.
Sara Teasdale
Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blas ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the...
Charles Baudelaire
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in fact any good mind properly taught can think like Euclid and like Walt Whitman. The Renaissance, as we saw, was full of such minds, equally competent as poet and as engineers. The modern notion of "the two cultures," incompatible under one skull, comes solely from the proliferation of specialties in science; but these also divide scientists into groups that do not understand one another, the cause being the sheer mass of detail and the diverse terminologies. In essence the human mind...
Jacques Barzun