#oral

It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury. ↗

— George Plimpton

#biography #editor #jury #oral #pleasures

Such is life. It is no cleaner than a kitchen; it reeks like a kitchen; and if you mean to cook your dinner, you must expect to soil your hands; the real art is in getting them clean again, and therein lies the whole morality of our epoch. ↗

— Honoré de Balzac

#morality #art

After the turbulence of death, moral principles and even religious proofs are called into question. ↗

— Salvatore Quasimodo

#called #death #even #into #moral

The Resistance is a moral certainty, not a poetic one. The true poet never uses words in order to punish someone. His judgment belongs to a creative order; it is not formulated as a prophetic scripture. ↗

— Salvatore Quasimodo

#certainty #creative #formulated #his #judgment

We could say that people who eat grits, listen to country music, follow stock-car racing, support corporal punishment in the schools, hunt 'possum, go to Baptist churches and prefer bourbon to Scotch are likely to be Southerners. ↗

— John Shelton Reed

#bourbon #churches #corporal #could #country

You always fear when you're making a movie that has a moral to the story that people are going to reject the idea of being taught a lesson. ↗

— Christina Ricci

#being #fear #going #idea #lesson

No, it is not my sense of the immorality of the Humbert Humbert-Lolita relationship that is strong; it is Humbert's sense. He cares, I do not. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere. And, anyway, cases of men in their forties marrying girls in their teens or early twenties have no bearing on Lolita whatever. Humbert was fond of "little girls"—not simply "young girls." Nymphets are girl-children, not starlets and "sex kittens." Lolita was twelve, not eighteen, when Humbert met her. You may remember that by the time she is fourteen, he refers to her as his "aging mistress. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#morality #nymphets #starlets #age

Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts. ↗

— Philip Roth

#audacity #authority #beauty #belief #contest

Daley may not feel a moral responsibility to eliminate discrimination but he has a legal obligation to do so. ↗

— Bobby Rush

#discrimination #eliminate #feel #legal #may

Because the Illinois death penalty system is arbitrary and capricious - and therefore immoral - I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. ↗

— George Ryan

#because #capricious #death #death penalty #i