One of the great natural phenomena is the way in which a tube of toothpaste suddenly empties itself when it hears that you are pla...nning a trip, so that when you come to pack it is just a twisted shell of its former self, with not even a cubic millimeter left to be squeezed out.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mining today is an affair of mathematics, of finance, of the latest in engineering skill. Cautious men behind polished desks in Sa...n Francisco figure out in advance the amount of metal to a cubic yard, the number of yards washed a day, the cost of each operation. They have no need of grubstakes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,--a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of... a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A tattered copy of Johnson's large Dictionary was a great delight to me, on account of the specimens of English versifications whi...ch I found in the Introduction. I learned them as if they were so many poems. I used to keep this old volume close to my pillow; and I amused myself when I awoke in the morning by reciting its jingling contrasts of iambic and trochaic and dactylic metre, and thinking what a charming occupation it must be to "make up" verses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a distinction to be drawn between true collectors and accumulators. Collectors are discriminating; accumulators act at ra...ndom. The Collyer brothers, who died among the tons of newspapers and trash with which they filled every cubic foot of their house so that they could scarcely move, were a classic example of accumulators, but there are many of us whose houses are filled with all manner of things that we "can't bear to throw away."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »