“The wonder washes over them rather than into them, and one of its effects is to make anything shocking or odd suddenly interesting enough to gain a month's celebrity.”
"A Surfeit of Fine Art" (1986), p. 127
The Culture We Deserve (1989)
Context: The eager or dutiful persons who subject themselves to these tidal waves of the classics and the moderns find everything wonderful in an absent-minded way. The wonder washes over them rather than into them, and one of its effects is to make anything shocking or odd suddenly interesting enough to gain a month's celebrity. And so another by-product of our come-one, come-all policy is the tendency to reward cleverness, not art, and to put one more hurdle in the path of the truly original artist.
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Jacques Barzun 46
Historian 1907–2012Related quotes
Source: The House Of Commons At Work (1993), Chapter 10, The Business of the House, p. 152
Source: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
“Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked.”
Not Browning, but a misquotation from Pearl Buck's China, Past and Present: "Ah well, perhaps one has to be very old before one learns how to be amused rather than shocked".
Misattributed
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Fourth Edition (2015)
1860s, Second Inaugural Address (1865)
Context: On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it — all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war — seeking to dissolve the Union, and divide effects, by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.