Word: pygmalion
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...hedgehog," said this frank reader, "my only good feature being my blue eyes. . . . Don't you think it would be a feather in your cap if you could be the one who changed this very ugly duckling into even a pale pink swan? If you have any of Pygmalion in you, please be a sport and help...
What made the play's failure doubly pathetic was that, despite Arms and the Man (1894). Candida (1894), Caesar and Cleopatra (1898), Man and Superman (1902), Major Barbara (1905), Getting Married (1908) and Pygmalion (1912), George Bernard Shaw had at 78 just been voted in a British newspaper poll the public's greatest bore (TIME...
...love of the surgeon may, Pygmalion-like, make his work so exquisite and perfect that the great Jehovah will touch it into life, even as Venus made the marble Galatea into vibrant, palpitating life. The surgeon must, with fingers that are dexterous beyond compare and with mind that plans, see the completed result in his imagination. He models and commands the method, carries out the procedure, puts the parts into perfect apposition, but God knits the scar. "He sews severed arteries that they may carry their crimson torrent without leak and without hindrance. The delicate nerve must be spliced...
...South Africa for a tuberculosis cure, leaving 22-year-old Mrs. Campbell with two children. When he came home six years later he found his wife the toast of London, friend of George Bernard Shaw, famed enough to add a line of her own to Shaw's Pygmalion. Between her husband's death in the Boer War and her son's death in the World War, she became famed for having her own way, once had a ton of tanbark dumped in Manhattan's 42nd Street to mute traffic noises during her performance...
Helen Keller in a syndicated story told of meeting Writer George Bernard Shaw in Lady Astor's London drawing-room. Miss Keller had been deeply affected by Pygmalion and Saint Joan, waited long in a flutter of hero worship for the great Shaw to wake from a nap. When he came, she groped out her hand, felt a hand "bristling with egotism" take it slackly. She: "I've wanted to know you for ever so long." He: "Why do all you Americans say the same thing?" Her companion tapped his words into her hand. Lady Astor...