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In the 1920s dramatists attacked their subjects as if the inequities could be resolved. Some of the traditional optimism of America lurked behind most of the early plays. But not now. There is no conviction now that the problem will be solved.

Brooks Atkinson

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Brooks Atkinson
Age: 89 †
Born: 1894
Born: November 28
Died: 1984
Died: January 14
Author
Critic
Journalist
Bay State
Justin Brooks Atkinson
Behinds
Attacked
Behind
Solved
America
Optimism
Problem
Plays
Play
Conviction
Dramatists
Traditional
Lurked
Early
Inequities
Subjects
Resolved

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Land was created to provide a place for boats to visit.
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The most fatal illusion is the settled point of view. Since life is growth and motion, a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one.
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The cult of nature is a form of patronage by people who have declared their materialistic independence from nature and do not have to struggle with nature every day of their lives.
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There is no joy so great as that of reporting that a good play has come to town.
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I have no objections to churches so long as they do not interfere with God's work.
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Although the theater is not life, it is composed of fragments or imitations of life, and people on both sides of the footlight have to unite to make the fragments whole and the imitations genuine.
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The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.
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In the ideal sense nothing is uninteresting there are only uninterested people.
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The evil that men do lives on the front pages of greedy newspapers, but the good is oft interred apathetically inside.
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Life is seldom as unendurable as, to judge by the facts, it logically ought to be.
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Say Yes to the seedlings and a giant forest cleaves the sky. Say Yes to the universe and the planets become your neighbors. Say Yes to dreams of love and freedom. It is the password to utopia.
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There is a good deal of solemn cant about the common interests of capital and labor. As matters stand, their only common interest is that of cutting each others throat.
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In every age 'the good old days' were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.
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Walking companions, like heroes, are difficult to pluck out of the crowd of acquaintances. Good dispositions, ready wit, friendly conversation serve well enough by the fireside but they prove insufficient in the field. For there you need transcendentalists-nothing less you need poets, sages, humorists and natural philosophers.
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We cheerfully assume that in some mystic way love conquers all, that good outweighs evil in the just balances of the universe and at the 11th hour something gloriously triumphant will prevent the worst before it happens.
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Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go.
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Poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.
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Every man with an idea has at least two or three followers.
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Although birds coexist with us on this eroded planet, they live independently of us with a self-sufficiency that is almost a rebuke. In the world of birds a symposium on the purpose of life would be inconceivable. They do not need it. We are not that self-reliant. We are the ones who have lost our way.
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Writing is not an end in itself but life transmuted into radiance.
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