Famous quotes containing the words empty and/or phenomena:
“Boy, I hate their empty shows,
Persian garlands I detest,
Bring me not the late-blown rose
Lingering after all the rest:
Plainer myrtle pleases me
Thus outstretched beneath my vine,
Myrtle more becoming thee,
Waiting with thy master’s wine.”
—Horace [Quintus Horatius Flaccus] (65–8)
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)