Controlled hysteria is what's required. To exist constantly in a state of controlled hysteria. It's agony. But everyone has agony. The difference is that I try to take my agony home and teach it to sing.
Arthur MillerRead
The word "now" is like a bomb through the window, and it ticks.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the urgency and impact of the present moment.
Arthur Miller's quote illustrates the significance of 'now' as a critical point in time that demands our attention and action. It suggests that the present moment, much like a ticking bomb, carries an inherent urgency, pushing us to recognize the fleeting nature of life and the importance of living fully in the moment.
In practice
During a motivational speech on living in the moment.
Controlled hysteria is what's required. To exist constantly in a state of controlled hysteria. It's agony. But everyone has agony. The difference is that I try to take my agony home and teach it to sing.
Amos Oz is one of the finest novelists of this entire period. MY MICHAEL is a beautiful work of great depth and in some indescribable way lingers in the mind as a lyric song to his country's people as much as a moving love story.
Just remember, kid, you can quicker get back a million dollars that was stole than a word that you gave away.
Oh,Elizabeth, your justice would freeze beer.
The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.
Immortality is like trying to carve your initials in a block of ice in the middle of July.
One certain effect of war is to diminish freedom of expression. Patriotism becomes the order of the day, and those who question the war are seen as traitors, to be silenced and imprisoned.
I looked at it [revolver] as if it reminded me of a crime I had committed with an irrepressible smile such as rises sometimes to people’s lips in the face of great catastrophes which are beyond their grasp, the smile that comes at times on certain women’s faces while they are saying they regret the harm they have done. It is the smile of nature quietly and proudly asserting its natural right to kill.
I am convinced that the deepest desire within each of us is to be liberated from the controlling influences of our own psychic madness or patterns of fear. All other things—the disdain of ordinary life, the need to control others rather than be controlled, the craving for material goods as a means of security and protection against the winds of chaos—are external props that serve as substitutes for the real battle, which is the one waged within the individual soul.
It is so difficult to draw a clear line of separation between the abuse and the wholesome use of the press, that as yet we have found it better to trust the public judgment, rather than the magistrate, with the discrimination between truth and falsehood. And hitherto the public judgment has performed that office with wonderful correctness.
You and your sins must separate, or you and your God will never come together.
Even while writing about foreign places, I have been in a way writing about America, because that's the subject that interests me the most. I'm attached to it, critical, but it's definitely my country, and maybe even more so when I'm overseas.
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