The point of the dragonfly's terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows,... is not that it all fits together like clockwork--for it doesn't ... but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, finged tangle. Freedom is the world's water and weather, the world's nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. ...It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes--love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself--and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others--should we call it "joy"?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The only law was that enforced by the Creek Lighthorsemen and the U.S. deputy marshals who paid rare and brief visits; or the "two... volumes of common law" that every man carried strapped to his thighs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It might be seen by what tenure men held the earth. The smallest stream is mediterranean sea, a smaller ocean creek within the lan...d, where men may steer by their farm bounds and cottage lights. For my own part, but for the geographers, I should hardly have known how large a portion of our globe is water, my life has chiefly passed within so deep a cove. Yet I have sometimes ventured as far as to the mouth of my Snug Harbor.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you feed a man, and wash his clothes, and borne his children, you and that man are married, that man is yours. If you sweep a h...ouse, and tend its fires and fill its stoves, and there is love in you all the years you are doing this, then you and that house are married, that house is yours.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a word to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game..., then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and delight, the canary that sings on the skull.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing.... ...The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must... somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what's going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »