Quotes About Modernism

Today the elite - those who think of themselves as such - would be more likely to favor the garbage than the masses would. But they think they're holding the standards up by doing so. It's the movement toward modernism, in which all the old values have been inverted.

In 1939, Orwell wrote a long essay titled 'Inside the Whale,' about modernism, the nineteen-thirties, Henry Miller, and 'Tropic of Cancer.'

One of the outstanding achievements of the new constructional technique has been the abolition of the separating function of the wall.

In one sense, (Duchamp's) "The Large Glass" is a glimpse into Hell; a peculiarly modernist Hell of repetition and loneliness.

I shared his love of the countryside and of the old ways of building; I believed, as he did, that the modernist styles of architecture that were desecrating our town were also destroying its social fabric; and I saw, for the first time in my life, that it is always right to conserve things, when worse things are proposed in their place. That a priori law of practical reason is also the truth in conservatism.

City of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automation, its streets a triumph of cubism, its moral philosophy that of the dollar. New York impressed me tremendously because, more than any other city, it is the fullest expression of our modern age.

Oh, sure. Of course, they say now that we've got Freud and the motorcar, God is dead." "He's not dead; just very tired.

That gesture was intended as, in itself, a political act. And the editors were not simply proposing that modernist art and literature could be appreciated regardless of one's politics; they were committed to explaining why an appreciation for modernism was consistent with political progressivism.

The Partisan case was advanced as well by Trilling's insistence that what commends modernist writing to progressive readers is, precisely, the challenge it often makes to progressive belief: "The contemporary authors we most wish to read and most wish to admire for their literary qualities demand of us a great agility and ingenuity in coping with their antagonism to our social and political ideals.

These days too many of us seem inclined to cover our ears, close our eyes, and blindly follow the most narrow, conservative tenets of religion or else seek comfort in the ancient traditions of New Age ritual.

He was never quite at home in what we may call our post-positivist era

The chauffeuses . . . were manifestly ladies of the new school . . . not sitting in balconies, gazing at sympathetic stars and longing for the hero to return. No, indeed, they were following him in a motor car.

At ground level Alexanderplatz is a monstrous expanse of grey concrete designed to make people feel small. It works.

On découvrait le "nouveau roman", Butor, Robbe-Grillet, Sollers, Sarraute, on voulait l'aimer mais on ne trouvait pas en lui assez de secours pour vivre.

If you ever want to understand multitasking in prose, James Joyce is your man.

If only people realized Corbusier is pure nineteenth century, Manchester school utilitarian, and that's why they like him.

Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food. (201)

I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish.

To dodge the rules and say useless things sums up the essentially modern attitude.

Fitzgerald was a modernist.

When you get to be 103, modernism is a very wide concept.

People tend to see modernism as the opposite of a celebration. They see it as a fracturing and an art built round an absence, but it's really a celebration of our existence.

Collage is the twentieth century's greatest innovation

Not prepared to recognize where, when, or what he is living, the Australian consciously and subconsciously directs his artificial environment to be uncommitted, tentative, temporary, a nondescript economic-functionalist background on which he can hang the features which for the moment appeal to his wandering, restless eye.