Word: scornful
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Pooh-poohing grandiose abstractions, she persistently reasserted that the prime requisites for fiction are specific details, concrete images and exact sensations. "The fact is that the materials of the fiction writer are the humblest. Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough...
...critic foolish enough to exclaim "Aha!" over gross parallels between Nabokov's experience and his literary creations is viewed by the author with scorn. Yet the soft, pervasive breath of Paradise Lost that whispers through Ada is more than an echo of Everyman's lost ardor. It is a transmogrified version of Nabokov's own lost private Eden in the Russia of his childhood. With his wealthy and gifted family, he lived in a town house in prerevolutionary St. Petersburg, and at Vyra, an idyllic, rambling country estate. For Nabokov, his two brothers and two sisters and their parents, life...
...sanctity of all life and with the faculty of a primitive animist?vestigial in modern man ?of investing inanimate objects with life. He is inclined to deny that any utility, morality or heavy philosophical meaning should be attributed to his art. He dismisses such suggestions with the same scorn that he once made use of when a clubwoman asked him what butterflies were for. Nevertheless, certain deductions can be drawn from Nabokov's writing. In Bend Sinister, he composed a picture of crude, lumpish evil-in-power, and he put Yeats' much quoted "rough beast" into a Bolshevik...
...part of an even greater gathering of "ups." However, the term "speed" is usually applied to those very large does of amphetamines that hippies and other tramps take for kicks. Taking drugs for kicks is the kind of sensory self-indulgence that we of the protestant ethic scorn. These self same people who become "speed freaks" also take LSD, not for the clear light and revelation, but for the voltage that burns out their synapses. These people are not to be worried about, though, because most of them...
...that the three iconoclasts are prepared to do without a great deal that Burgess is not. The essay in which Burgess puts a few of the 50 treasures back in their places, and the three "naughty, smackable" cutups back in theirs, is a masterpiece of robust derision and scholarly scorn. This over, he bursts out against the show-offs: "I've never in all my reading encountered such bloody arrogance...