Word: mute
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Like the little boy of The Painted Bird, Kosinski wandered the villages of Eastern Europe alone while World War II ravaged the continent. Like the idiot of Being There, Kosinski abandoned Europe for the United States, arriving there stupid and mute. And like the heroes of his later novels, he married a fabulously wealthy widow who died six years later leaving him nothing...
...survivor of Auschwitz could find no consolation. Behind great glass containers the story of the prisoners was presented in mute detail: a room of human hair, to be used by the Reich for textiles; a room of confiscated Jewish prayer shawls. Commission members could see the gas chambers near by, but what no one could see, except the survivors in their minds' eyes, was the process of selection that led to death. A former prisoner testified in an Auschwitz guidebook: "During the selection of children, the SS men had placed a rod at the height of 1.20 meters. Children...
...France, especially to Denis Diderot, compiler of the monumental Encyclopedia. "It is the chief business of art," Diderot declared in 1765, "to touch and to move, and to do this by getting close to nature." Chardin, Diderot said, epitomized that ambition at work: "Welcome back, great magician, with your mute compositions! How eloquently they speak to the artist! How much they tell him about the representation of nature, the science of color and harmony! How freely the air flows around these objects!" Few painters have ever had such a press as the one which, interrupted by a few decades...
...founding fathers knew what a President should look like, they kept it to themselves. A President, says the Constitution, need only be a native-born resident and old enough (35) to be dry behind the ears. The law is mute on the shape and size of those ears and other elements of physiognomy, stature and hirsuteness that go into the chimerical mix of looks...
...power and need to create, over and beyond reproduction, is native both in women and in men. Where the gifted among women [and men] have remained mute, or have never attained full capacity, it is because of circumstances, inner or outer, which oppose the needs of creation." Tillie Olsen