The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He rememb...ered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, "The very rich are different from you and me." And how someone had said to Julian, "Yes, they have more money."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That's how it all began. Looking back on it, I wonder now if it could have been on some day... Findable in an old calendar? But no, It wasn't out of history, but inside it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Father Time is not always a hard parent, and, though he tarries for none of his children, often lays his hand lightly upon those w...ho have used him well; making them old men and women inexorably enough, but leaving their hearts and spirits young and in full vigour. With such people the grey head is but the impression of the old fellow's hand in giving them his blessing, and every wrinkle but a notch in the quiet calendar of a well- spent life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Here stands the row of enormous stelæ that have furnished the date that links the Mayan calendar to ours. These stones standing g...rimly in line, swelling with the enormous strength of their halfobliterated carvings, still give you, through all the confusion of races and empires long dead, of languages and writings that can never be understood, a feeling of serene order and form... so that after seeing them, the railroad and the guns and the overseers and the loading sheds and the uptodate malaria hospital, all the carefully organized machinery for efficiently squeezing...the sweat and blood of the yellow brown and white mongrel race of workers who live in the rows of company shacks...seems feeble and flabby, not organization at all, not order at all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men of extraordinary success, in their honest moments, have always sung, "Not unto us, not unto us." According to the faith of the...ir times, they have built altars to Fortune, or to Destiny, or to St. Julian. Their success lay in their parallelism to the course of thought, which found in them an unobstructed channel; and the wonders of which they were the visible conductors seemed to their eye their deed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To divide one's life by years is of course to tumble into a trap set by our own arithmetic. The calendar consents to carry on its ...dull wall-existence by the arbitrary timetables we have drawn up in consultation with those permanent commuters, Earth and Sun. But we, unlike trees, need grow no annual rings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...I never thought of anything but a long full life with my love, but a heavy foreboding hit me about two years into this planned ...bliss, when he said firmly that we must never go back to the fishing village where we had spent our first Christmas. And a cruel mixture of disbelief and sadness filled me as I came to understand how thoroughly and firmly he stood by his conviction, that if people know real happiness anywhere, they must never expect to find it there again.... So that year we went to Nuremberg, and the next year Strasbourg and and and, but we never returned to any place we had been before, because once, according to his private calendar, we had been there. And in a few more years we parted. You might say that we ran out of places.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A convention is a social pattern we have chosen to prefer over whatever the raw world simply proffers. It is a sign of the operati...on of the mind, drawing the assent of a sufficient number of other minds so that the agreement will be widely operative. A convention is not a custom; a custom is a habit in which a sufficient number acquiesce. A custom can appear as a convention, but it is really a lesser act, the result of passive acceptance rather than of the imposition of design. It is the difference between learning to live by the annual flooding of the river or by a calendar.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Much poetry seems to be aware of its situation in time and of its relation to the metronome, the clock, and the calendar. ... The ...season or month is there to be felt; the day is there to be seized. Poems beginning "When" are much more numerous than those beginning "Where" of "If." As the meter is running, the recurrent message tapped out by the passing of measured time is mortality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »