Is our day of creative life finished? Does there remain to us only the strange, awful afterwards of the knowledge in dissolution, ...the African knowledge, but different for us, who are blond and blue-eyed from the north?.... There was another way, the way of freedom. There was the paradisal entry into pure, single being ... which accepted the obligation of the permanent connection with others, and with the other, submits to the yoke and leash of love, but never forfeits its own proud individual singleness, even while it loves and yields.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We must remain as close to the flowers, the grass, and the butterflies as the child is who is not yet so much taller than they are.... We adults, on the other hand, have outgrown them and have to lower ourselves to stoop down to them. It seems to me that the grass hates us when we confess our love for it.--Whoever would partake of all good things must understand how to be small at times.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They live everywhere on forest grass and water... that they've taken for themselves and even then, the love of a buck and his doe ends only in death.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We often love to think now of the life of men on beaches,--at least in midsummer, when the weather is serene; their sunny lives on... the sand, amid the beach-grass and bayberries, their companion a cow, their wealth a jag of driftwood or a few beach plums, and their music the surf and the peep of the beech-bird.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The beach-grass is "two to four feet high, of a sea-green color," and it is said to be widely diffused over the world. In the Hebr...ides it is used for mats, pack-saddles, bags, hats, etc.: paper has been made of it at Dorchester in this State, and cattle eat it when tender. It has heads somewhat like rye, from six inches to a foot in length, and it is propagated both by roots and seeds. To express its love for sand, some botanists have called it Psamma arenaria, which is the Greek for sand, qualified by the Latin for sandy,--or sandy sand. As it is blown about by the wind, while it is held fast by its roots, it describes myriad circles in the sand as accurately as if they were made by compasses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural... wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they came from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them--with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Strictly speaking, one cannot legislate love, but what one can do is legislate fairness and justice. If legislation does not prohi...bit our living side by side, sooner or later your child will fall on the pavement and I'll be the one to pick her up. Or one of my children will not be able to get into the house and you'll have to say, "Stop here until your mom comes here." Legislation affords us the chance to see if we might love each other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
During those years in Stamps, I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare. He was my first white love.... it was Shakespeare w...ho said, "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes." It was a state of mind with which I found myself most familiar. I pacified myself about his whiteness by saying that after all he had been dead so long it couldn't matter to anyone any more.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »