Across Parker Avenue from the fort is the Site of the Old Gallows, where 83 men "stood on nothin', a-lookin' up a rope." The platf...orm had a trap wide enought to "accommodate" 12 men, but half that number was the highest ever reached. On two occasions six miscreants were executed. There were several groups of five, some quartets and trios.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Unbreachable the fort Of the long-batter'd world uplifts its wall;... And strange and vain the earthly turmoil grows, And near and real the charm of thy repose, And night as welcome as a friend would fall.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Old heavens, you used to tweak above us, Standing like rain whenever a salvo . . . Old heavens,... You lying there above the old, but not ruined, fort, Can you hear, there, what I am saying? For it is you I am parodying, Your invisible denials.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most literature on the culture of adolescence focuses on peer pressure as a negative force. Warnings about the "wrong crowd" read ...like tornado alerts in parent manuals. . . . It is a relative term that means different things in different places. In Fort Wayne, for example, the wrong crowd meant hanging out with liberal Democrats. In Connecticut, it meant kids who weren't planning to get a Ph.D. from Yale.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
'Tis said of love that it sometimes goes, sometimes flies; runs with one, walks gravely with another; turns a third into ice, and ...sets a fourth in a flame: it wounds one, another it kills: like lightning it begins and ends in the same moment: it makes that fort yield at night which it besieged but in the morning; for there is no force able to resist it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Basically the cleavage between the two cities is of the simplest: Dallas is where the east ends, and Fort Worth is notoriously "wh...ere the west begins." Dallas is a baby Manhattan; Fort Worth is a cattle annex. Dallas has the suave and glittering clothes of Neiman Marcus; Fort Worth has dust and stockyards. For this a perfectly good historical reason exists. The Texas and Pacific Railway, reaching Dallas from the east in 1872, stopped there; the line was not pushed the few miles westward to Fort Worth till 1876. And in the intervening years dozens of big eastern firms--mercantile establishments, distributors, and the like--got nicely settled in Dallas, and have stayed there ever since. Dallas was the end of the line.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You can't build life the way you put blocks together, Toddy.... Did Knox teach you what makes the blood flow? Did he tell you how ...thoughts come and how they go, and why things are remembered and forgot?... What makes a thought start?... You don't know and you'll never know or understand.... Look, look at yourself. Could you be a doctor, a healing man, with the things those eyes have seen? There's a lot of knowledge in those eyes, but no understanding.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Being blunt with your feelings is very American. In this big country, I can be as brash as New York, as hedonistic as Los Angeles,... as sensuous as San Francisco, as brainy as Boston, as proper as Philadelphia, as brawny as Chicago, as warm as Palm Springs, as friendly as my adopted home town of Dallas, Fort Worth, and as peaceful as the inland waterway that rubs up against my former home in Virginia Beach.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »