
“He had lost control over his own body, he realized dully.”
Source: The Icebound Land
“He had lost control over his own body, he realized dully.”
Source: The Icebound Land
Nonconformity (1953/1996)
Context: The American middle class's faith in personal comfort as an end in itself is, in essence, a denial of life. And it has been imposed upon American writers and playwrights strongly enough to cut them off from their deeper sources. The shortcut to comfort is called “specialization,” and in an eye-ear-nose-and-throat doctor this makes sense. But in a writer it is fatal. The less he sees of other writers the more of a writer he will ultimately become. When he sees scarcely anyone except other writers, he is ready for New York.
“… the more he did nothing, the less time he had to do anything.”
Source: Anna Karenina
"Coon Tree," The New Yorker (14 June 1956), The Points of My Compass: Letters from the East, the West, the North, the South (1962); reprinted in Essays of E.B. White (1977)
Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 77 (p. 774)
Part 2: "The Habit of Truth", §5 (p. 35)
Science and Human Values (1956, 1965)
“Every time man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less.”
1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)
Context: Every time man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less. He may learn that what he thought was true was not true. By the elimination of a false premise, his basic capital wealth which in his given lifetime is disembarrassed of further preoccupation with considerations of how to employ a worthless time-consuming hypothesis. Freeing his time for its more effective exploratory investment is to give man increased wealth.