"Modern Fiction"
The Common Reader (1925)
Context: Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.
“Customs which are consistent may be pleaded against each other.”
Ball v. Herbert (1789), 3 T. R. 264.
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Sir Francis Buller, 1st Baronet 24
British judge 1746–1800Related quotes
Message-ID <20050516005559.GC26184@wall.org> http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.language/21259, to perl6-language mailing-list.
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“Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other.”
1860s
Context: There is no doubt that all nations are aggressive; it is the nature of man. There start up from time to time between countries antagonistic passions and questions of conflicting interest, which, if not properly dealt with, would terminate in the explosion of war. Now, if one country is led to think that another country, with which such questions might arise, is from fear disposed on every occasion tamely to submit to any amount of indignity, that is an encouragement to hostile conduct and to extreme proceedings which lead to conflict. It may be depended on that there is no better security for peace between nations than the conviction that each must respect the other, that each is capable of defending itself, and that no insult or injury committed by the one against the other would pass unresented.
Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1862/feb/17/obsebvations in the House of Commons (17 February 1862).
“Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.”
Source: The Philosophy of the Act, 1938, p. 187. Essay 13. "Perception and the Spatiotemporal"
" The Influence Of Women On The Progress Of Knowledge http://www.public.coe.edu/~theller/soj/u-rel/buckle.html". Lecture given at the Royal Institution 19 March 1858. In: The Miscellaneous and Posthumous Works of Henry Thomas Buckle (1872)
Source: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 8
Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789)