Word: epigraph
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...burly stream with its share of trout," which-what's this? -"rises in northern China, meanders through an Indian reservation in central Wisconsin, and empties finally into Croton Lake not a mile from where I live in southern New York State." The novel's epigraph, the reader notes with a sense of having been sandbagged, is a whimsy of the trout-fishing sage, Sparse Grey Hackle, who says that the water of the Hassayampa "renders those who drink it incapable of telling the truth...
Deftly played by Charles Grodin, Lenny is a half brother to Alex Portnoy, whose adolescent reverie while he watched "the gentile girls" ice-skating at night ("How do they get so gorgeous, so healthy, so blonde?") might make a good epigraph for The Heartbreak Kid. Lenny's hangdog adoration of Kelly, the definitive homecoming queen, turns him into exactly the kind of chattering fool that Lila was. One of the crucial problems with the movie is that Shepherd, who is ideally icy in the earlier Miami scenes, cannot manage the difficult transition into actually caring for Lenny. Even...
...fits of self-doubt, he is the most naturally egotistic artist since Benvenuto Cellini, a standing refutation of the cozy untruth that geniuses are rather humble at heart. Significantly, he read Nietzsche when he was young, and there is an exhortation in Zarathustra that could well serve as the epigraph to his career: "You must become a chaos if you would give birth to a dancing star...
...novels of Edith Wharton and Henry James.) To grasp for a descriptive phrase. Furth seems to be in the process of fashioning a comedy of lost possibilities. Twigs--as it plays the lives of its three sisters off against one another--could almost take for a second epigraph the words sung by Benjamin Stone, the success-failure of Follies...
Again from the epigraph: "Plump-face men will mumble academic phrases... gentlemen of the cloth will speak unctuously of values and standards." One can easily picture the set of Hoover's bulldog jowls and imagine his inflection, particularly on the word "peace," when he suggested that King's behavior was hardly befitting the standards expected of a Nobel Prize winner. Equally conceivable is the overwhelming sense of dislocation and betrayal that must have hit King like the hot and hard wind of a desert sand storm. The camera and the microphone, which had been his two biggest weapons from...