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“We have a bad culture, let’s face it. It starts with the public school system, which is a disaster for people who do not come from well-to-do families. Students don’t learn American history, they don’t learn much about the world, they don’t learn languages. They’re kind of out of it.”
Gore Vidal Bookforum Dec/Jan 2007: 45.
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“Look at Kenneth Burke, for example; a theorist if ever there was one, but now a forgotten theorist, virtually.”
–Frank Kermode, “Value After Theory,” Life.After.Theory. ed. Michael Payne and John Schad New York: Continuum, 2003: 60.
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“Steadman was certain that doctors brought healthy people down by uttering dire warnings and attaching the most grotesque meaning to the commonest and least harmful symptoms.”
–Paul Theroux, Blinding Light NY: 187
“Yesterday in Boston, at Pinky’s, he had been reflective, for nakedness was like defiance. The dancers had been girlish and coy, playful, teasing, protected by their nudity. Even the barest woman in the place looked peeled and raw, just feeble startled limbs, going through the motions, and others seemed more like pork to him now. Becasue he saw too much, something important was missing. The essential woman was hidden inside all that naked flesh.”
–Theroux, Blinding Light, 195.
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“Words are like us, they’re born with one face and what can you do about it.”
Hopscotch 252
