All of childhood's unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.
|
'Exactly,' he said, while he leant forward excitedly, for all the world like a Jack-in-the-box let loose. 'Precisely; and you are a journalist - call yourself one, at least - and it should be part of your business to notice and describe people. I don't mean only the wonderful personage with the clear Saxon features, the fine blue eyes, the noble brow and classic face, but the ordinary person - the person who represents ninety out of every hundred of his own kind - the average Englishman, say, of the middle classes, who is neither very tall nor very short, who wears a moustache which is neither fair nor dark, but which masks his mouth, and a top hat which hides the shape of his head and brow, a man, in fact, who dresses like hundreds of his fellow-creatures, moves like them, speaks like them, has no peculiarity.'
|
How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing. It seems still more impossible that a quarrel which has already been settled in principle should be the subject of war.
|
When so much mistreatment of animals continues, when the cries of thirsty beasts from our railway cars die out unheard, when so much brutality prevails in our slaughterhouses, when animals meet a painful death in our kitchens, when animals suffer incredibly from merciless men and are turned over to the cruel play of children, WE ALL BEAR THE GUILT FOR IT. We are afraid of shocking people if we let it be noticed how much we are moved by the suffering man brings to animals. We think that others may have become more 'rational' than we, and may accept as customary and as a matter of course the things we have gotten excited about. Once in a while, however, a word suddenly slips out which shows that even they have not yet become reconciled to this suffering. Now they come very close to us though they were formerly strangers. The masks with which we were deceiving each other fall off. Now we learn from each other that no one is able to escape the grip of the cruelty that flourishes ceaselessly around us.'
|
The terrible immoralities are the cunning ones hiding behind masks of morality, such as exploiting people while pretending to help them.
|
During a carnival, men put masks over their masks.
|
I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope -- an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
|
You know the oxygen masks on airplanes ? I don't think there's really any oxygen. I think they're just to muffle the screams.
|
To say I accept in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration-camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas-masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press-censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films and political murder.
|
The theater, bringing impersonal masks to life, is only for those who are virile enough to create new life: either as a conflict of passions subtler than those we already know, or as a complete new character.
|
Lawyers can steal more money with a briefcase than a thousand men with guns and masks.
|
The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.
|
The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party when the masks are dropped.
|
Totem poles and wooden masks no longer suggest tribal villages but fashionable drawing rooms in New York and Paris.
|
Earlier on in my career I felt that I had to hide behind a lot of different masks, and showboat ways of performing. Now, that's a lie. The less I have to hide, the less I have to act.
|
Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
|