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...the pleasure of astounding people combined with the arrogant satisfaction of never being astounded oneself. - Bandelaire

"Man is weak, woman is strong, Chance is all-powerful." - Potugin

Why did he like shadows so much? His answer was that Orientals had always liked them, and that he was an Oriental. As for why Orientals liked them, he have two reasons: Orientals were by nature passive, and had learned to live with darkness instead of trying to conquer it as Occidentals did; and Orientals, with their darker skins, had automatically cultivated a sense of beauty befitting their complexion.

Modern Japanese writers by Mahoto Ueda p66

(on Tanizaki, Junichiro)

If the actor has real versatility and charm, a spectator with refined taste and sensitivity can, as he watches the sensual and bodily

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beauty being created on stage, feel something eternal emerging from it: he can feel spiritual beauty. In the actor's face, eyes, or posture, the spectator can get a momentary glimpse of that eternal beauty found in a masterpiece of painting or architecture. Beauty of form elevated to this height is worth as much as beauty of context.

p81

He found a felicity in a Cole Porter lyric, which in part came from its being unburdened by assertion, uncluttered by commitment or belief; it floated past the ear as a verbal bubble that was going nowhere, weightless and undirected. If language is in this way set free to follow its own rhyme and rhythm, with only the lightest puff of conscious control, it will by chance occasionally alight on an unexpected shadow of thought, which is memorable, through an improbable linguistic accident. Auden always believed in the