Famous quotes containing the word western:
“All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently its your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“In the woods in a winter afternoon one will see as readily the origin of the stained glass window, with which Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing branches of the forest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment ones own growing inner self.... The minds dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of ones own solitude, that solitude whose final form is ones confrontation with ones own mortality.”
—Harold Bloom (b. 1930)