William Smith Otis

Famous quotes containing the words william, smith and/or otis:

    Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.
    David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)

    What joy can the years bring half so sweet as the unhappiness they’ve taken away?
    —Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946)

    It’s not that I don’t want to be a beauty, that I don’t yearn to be dripping with glamor. It’s just that I can’t see how any woman can find time to do to herself all the things that must apparently be done to make herself beautiful and, having once done them, how anyone without the strength of mind of a foreign missionary can keep up such a regime.
    —Cornelia Otis Skinner (1901–1979)