Mass

Famous quotes containing the word mass:

“For half a mile from the shore it was one mass of white breakers, which, with the wind, made such a din that we could hardly hear ourselves speak.... This was the stormiest sea that we witnessed,—more tumultuous, my companion affirmed, than the rapids of Niagara, and, of course, on a far greater scale. It was the ocean in a gale, a clear, cold day, with only one sail in sight, which labored much, as if it were anxiously seeking a harbor.... It was the roaring sea, thalassa exeessa.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

“At first, he savored only the material quality of the sounds secreted by the instruments. And it had already been a great pleasure when, beneath the tiny line of the violin, slender, resistant, dense and driving, he noticed the mass of the piano’s part seeking to arise in a liquid splashing, polymorphous, undivided, level and clashing like the purple commotion of wave charmed and flattened by the moonlight.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)

“It is almost impossible to be a doctor and an honest man, but it is obscenely impossible to be a psychiatrist without at the same time bearing the stamp of the most incontestable madness: that of being unable to resist that old atavistic reflex of the mass of humanity, which makes any man of science who is absorbed by this mass a kind of natural and inborn enemy of all genius.”
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)