“Callas? She was pure electricity.”

— Leonard Bernstein

As quoted in Callas: The Art and the Life (1974) by John Ardoin

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Callas? She was pure electricity." by Leonard Bernstein?

Leonard Bernstein 17

American composer, conductor, author, music lecturer, and p… 1918–1990

Related quotes

“The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 8

“She loves the serene brutality of the ocean, loves the electric power she felt with each breath of wet, briny air.”

Holly Black (1971) American children's fiction writer

Source: Tithe

“It’s the light, she thought. Everyone looks like a cutthroat by torchlight. No wonder they invented electricity.”

Connie Willis book Doomsday Book

Source: Doomsday Book (1992), Chapter 20 (p. 320)

“Talent is like electricity. We don't understand electricity. We use it.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

“The electrical, the magnetic element in Woman has not been fairly brought out at any period. Everything might be expected from it; she has far more of it than Man.”

Margaret Fuller book Woman in the Nineteenth Century

Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)
Context: The electrical, the magnetic element in Woman has not been fairly brought out at any period. Everything might be expected from it; she has far more of it than Man. This is commonly expressed by saying that her intuitions are more rapid and more correct. You will often see men of high intellect absolutely stupid in regard to the atmospheric changes, the fine invisible links which connect the forms of life around them, while common women, if pure and modest, so that a vulgar self do not overshadow the mental eye, will seize and delineate these with unerring discrimination.
Women who combine this organization with creative genius are very commonly unhappy at present. They see too much to act in conformity with those around them, and their quick impulses seem folly to those who do not discern the motives. This is an usual effect of the apparition of genius, whether in Man or Woman, but is more frequent with regard to the latter, because a harmony, an obvious order and self-restraining decorum, is most expected from her.
Then women of genius, even more than men, are likely to be enslaved by an impassioned sensibility. The world repels them more rudely, and they are of weaker bodily frame.
Those who seem overladen with electricity frighten those around them.