Startling Quotes - page 4
When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock, to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures.
Flannery O’Connor
There is something quite startling in the law that will gladden the hearts of eugenicists, who are considerable in number -- though many are still in the closet. The section on Abortion Procedures declares that the state is not permitted to interfere -- at any stage -- in a woman's decision to terminate a pregnancy if "the fetus is affected by genetic defect or serious deformity or abnormality."
Nat Hentoff
There's no redder rag for our modern, progressive Catholics than a certain religious approach to sex and Eros ranging from suspicion to open condemnation and branded accordingly as Manichean, neo-Platonic, Puritan, etc. Quite unacceptable. And yet in these quite obviously heretical speculations there's a barb which, even at first encounter, penetrated to the depths of my mind as the startling confirmation of something always known, and this ferment keeps on working - all the time...the idea which one finds in so many apocryphal trends of thought, i. e. that there's definitely something wrong with sex in its present form, that is, during this terrestrial aeon - something that is not sex in itself, as a whole, but some trait or quality.. Something which does not belong to original human nature, but which owes its actual existence to The Fall; in the same sense unnatural as death is unnatural and yet taken for granted, an inevitable, undeniable factor - in this fallen world.
Ida Friederike Görres
The close affinity between sexual Eros and deceit is very startling - as in infatuation, infidelity and jealousy: " Quoniam lumbi mei repleti sunt illusionibus. " For, isolated, Eros is in every sense the most treacherous counterfeit of love, sending a continual flow of self-deception and delusion throughout the world, etc.
Ida Friederike Görres
To my delight, Federico had seen Dans la ville blanche (1983) by Swiss director Alain Tanner. Enthusiastic about Bruno Ganz's performance, he also was impressed by the film's startling visual poetry of Lisbon achieved by transferring inferior film stock onto 35mm. It was exactly this kind of uncomplicated technical innovation that inspired Federico during the writing of Attore. Conceived in 1992, Attore focused on the craft and the psychology of actors. Having completed a film treatment with roles for Mastroianni, Giulietta Masina, and Paolo Villagio, Fellini was now wondering if he should provide Marcello with a home movie camera to be used in a loosely Shakespearian sense that all the world's a film set. The 8mm footage of intimate memories of the theatre from his Rimini childhood would then be transferred to 35mm – a most intriguing idea that would have been a new departure for the Maestro had he lived to bring it to the screen.
Damian Pettigrew
History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts.
Gilbert Highet
No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept. For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.
Gertrude Stein
