The Living - A Comedy of Customs

Famous quotes containing the words living, comedy and/or customs:

    And that enquiring man John Synge comes next,
    That dying chose the living world for text
    And never could have rested in the tomb
    But that, long travelling, he had come
    Towards nightfall upon certain set apart
    In a most desolate stony place....
    William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)

    It is comedy which typifies, where it is tragedy which individualizes; where tragedy observes the nice distinctions between man and man, comedy stresses those broad resemblances which make it difficult to tell people apart.
    Harry Levin (b. 1912)

    Is a civilization naturally backward because it is different? Outside of cannibalism, which can be matched in this country, at least, by lynching, there is no vice and no degradation in native African customs which can begin to touch the horrors thrust upon them by white masters. Drunkenness, terrible diseases, immorality, all these things have been gifts of European civilization.
    —W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt)