The Least Stupid Question A

The Older I Grow The More Sharply I Mistrust Words. So Few Of Them Have Any Meaning Left. It Is Impossible To Write One Sentence In Which Every Word Has The Bareness And Hardness Of Bones, The Reality Of The Skeleton.

An Animal Is Not Cruel; It Lives Wholly In The Instant Leap On Its Prey, In The Present Taste Of Marrow Or Blood. Cruelty Begins With The Memory, And The Pleasures Of The Memory Are Impure; They Draw Their Strength Along Levels Where No Sun Has Reached.

Sadistic Literature Is Not Only Inhumane. It Is Anti-human.

In What Touches Their Social Convictions, Most Persons Do Not Think. The Threat Of Change, With All It Suggests To Them In The Loss Of Social And Economic Privilege, Alarms So Deeply That They Are Incapable Of Unprejudiced Thought. They Seem To Themselves To Be Thinking, With Lucidity And Fairness, But Since They Start From The Conviction That Change Must Undoubtedly Be For The Worse Or From Settled Grief At The Thought Of Losing What Is Old And Lovely, They Are Doing No More Than Following A Logical Sequence Of Ideas From A False Premise.

Critics Have Been Amusing Themselves For A Long Time By Auscultating Fiction For Signs Of Heart Failure.