The greater part of our best years has been passed for our generation in these two great worldconvulsions. All will be changed aft...er this war, which spends in one month more than nations earned before in years ... there is no more security in our time than in those of the Reformation or the fall of Rome.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Those who actually set out to see the fall of a city ... or those who choose to go to a front line, are obviously asking themselve...s to what extent they are cowards. But the tests they set themselves--there is a dead body, can you bear to look at it?--are nothing in comparison with the tests that are sprung on them. It is not the obvious tests that matter (do you go to pieces in a mortar attack?) but the unexpected ones (here is a man on the run, seeking your help--can you face him honestly?).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This autumnal festival, when men are gathered in crowds in the streets as regularly and by as natural a law as the leaves cluster ...and rustle by the wayside, is naturally associated in my mind with the fall of the year. The low of cattle in the streets sounds like a hoarse symphony or running bass to the rustling of the leaves. The wind goes hurrying down the country, gleaning every loose straw that is left in the fields, while every farmer lad too appears to scud before it ... to country fairs and cattle-shows, to that Rome among the villages where the treasures of the year are gathered.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrine... for a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Knowledge of Rome must be physical, sweated into the system, worked up into the brain through the thinning shoe-leather.... When i...t comes to knowing, the senses are more honest than the intelligence. Nothing is more real than the first wall you lean up against sobbing with exhaustion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Run fast, stand still. This, the lesson from lizards. For all writers. Observe almost any survival creature, you see the same. Jum...p, run, freeze. In the ability to flick like an eyelash, crack like a whip, vanish like steam, here this instant, gone the next--life teems the earth. And when that life is not rushing to escape, it is playing statues to do the same. See the hummingbird, there, not there. As thought arises and blinks off, so this thing of summer vapor; the clearing of a cosmic throat, the fall of a leaf. And where it was--a whisper. What can we writers learn from lizards, lift from birds? In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping. In between the scurries and flights, what? Be a chameleon, ink- blend, chromosome change with the landscape. Be a pet rock, lie with the dust, rest in the rainwater in the filled barrel by the drainspout outside your grandparents' window long ago.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When a man hath no freedom to fight for at home, Let him combat for that of his neighbors;... Let him think of the glories of Greece and of Rome, And get knocked on the head for his labors.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »