Pedestrian Quotes
I can't call them linear narratives, and I can't call them chronological in a traditional, classical sense; I'm sure there's plenty of stuff I borrow more from William Faulkner than William Shakespeare. I just find it funny that at this point, we see a collection of highly charged, highly potent symbols as referring back to a classical aesthetic, because to me they seem deeply connected to the pedestrian actuality of real life.
Joanna Newsom
Perhaps a better title for The Da Vinci Code might be Much Ado About Nothing. When you boil away the hype and hysteria, all that remains is a pedestrian murder mystery that isn't sufficiently challenging or scandalous to raise anyone's hackles. It's preposterous, overlong, and saddled with a sloppy denouement that defines the term "anti-climax." The film's two big "surprises" are telegraphed early, and the ease with which they can be guessed (using the "conservation of characters" process) leeches the movie of a large measure of its suspense. Individual scenes are entertaining in their own right, but the production as a whole is a lumbering mess.
James Berardinelli
Any performance is discussible either from the standpoint of what it attains or what it misses. Comprehensiveness can be discussed as superficiality, intensiveness as stricture, tolerance as uncertainty-and the poor pedestrian abilities of a fish are clearly explainable in terms of his excellence as a swimmer. A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing-a focus upon object A involves a neglect of object B.
Kenneth Burke
What people fear most about tragedy is its randomness - a taxi cab jumps the curb and hits a pedestrian, a gun misfires and kills a bystander. Better to have some rational cause and effect between incident and injury. And if cause and effect aren't possible, better that there at least be some reward for all the suffering.
Jeffrey Kluger
Pope Benedict XVI is working softly, slowly, often silently, unobtrusively, behind the scenes, mostly unseen. But he is working hard. I like the great job of reconciliation that he is doing inside the Roman Catholic Church: reconciliation between traditionalists and liberals, conservative and reform-oriented faithful, liturgical Latinists and Mass polyglots, old-time lovers and progressives, high-flying souls and pedestrian believers, thinkers and doers--Christians and Catholics. It is a hidden work of diplomacy, interactions, influences, concessions, agreements, acknowledgments. A "hard job" well done until now.
Leon Bertoletti
The life of Lord Krishna has been misunderstood by many Western commentators. Scriptural allegory is baffling to literal minds. A hilarious blunder by a translator will illustrate this point. The story concerns an inspired medieval saint, the cobbler Ravidas, who sang in the simple terms of his own trade of the spiritual glory hidden in all mankind:
Under the vast vault of blue
Lives the divinity clothed in hide.
One turns aside to hide a smile on hearing the pedestrian interpretation given to Ravidas' poem by a Western writer:
"He afterwards built a hut, set up in it an idol which he made from a hide, and applied himself to its worship."
Paramahansa Yogananda
