The “Me” Decade and the Third Great Awakening.

One of the phrases that kept running through their conversation was “pushing the outside of the envelope.” The “envelope” was a flight-test term referring to the limits of a particular aircraft’s performance, how tight a turn it could make at such-and-such a speed, and so on. “Pushing the outside,” probing the outer limits, of the envelope seemed to be the great challenge and satisfaction of flight test.

All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well—how very shortsighted! . . . I had gotten it backward all along. Not “seeing is believing,” you ninny, but “believing is seeing,” for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintingsand other works exist only to illustrate the text .

Radical Chic . . . is only radical in Style; in its heart it is part of Society and its tradition—Politics, like Rock, Pop, and Camp, has its uses.

If a man has talent and cannot use it, he has failed. If he has a talent and uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he has a talent and learns somehow to use the whole of it, he has gloriously succeeded, and won a satisfaction and a triumph few men ever know.

Duh poor guy! . . . Maybe he’s found out by now dat he’ll neveh live long enough to know duh whole of Brooklyn. It’d take a guy a lifetime to know Brooklyn t’roo an’ t’roo. An’ even den, yuh wouldn’t know it all.

“Where they got you stationed now, Luke?” . . . [“]In Norfolk at the Navy base,” Luke answered, “m-m-making the world safe for hypocrisy.”

A young man is so strong, so mad, so certain, and so lost. He has everything and he is able to use nothing.

The world lay before him for his picking—full of opulent cities, golden vintages, glorious triumphs, lovely women, full of a thousand unmet and magnificent possibilities. Nothing was dull or tarnished. The strange enchanted coasts were unvisited. He was young and he could never die.

The great play is yet unwritten; the great novel beats with futile hands against the portals of my brain.