... no book ... ever competed with the Bible. The story of Ruth was better than Ramona, and the poetry of Job was better than Long...fellow. I still have my first big Bible, carefully underlined through with red and black ink, and interleafed [sic] with painfully written manuscript pages.... Margery and I earned our five cents a week for church and a penny for Sunday school by learning three verses of the Bible a day and six on Sunday. We learned dozens and dozens of chapters. I supposed "Evangeline" and "Hiawatha" were better poetry, but I didn't like them so well.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The true novel wrestles on the edge of understanding, lying about on all sides desperately, for every sort of experience, pressing... into use every flash of intuition or correspondence, trying to fuse together the crudest of materials, and the humblest, which the higher arts can't include. But it is precisely here, where the writer fights with the raw, the intractable, that poetry is born. Poetry, that is, of the novel: appropriate to it. The Story of an African Farm is a poetic novel; and when one has done with the "plot" and the characters, that is what remains: an endeavor, a kind of hunger, that passionate desire for growth and understanding, which is the deepest pulse of human beings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Desert rains are usually so definitely demarked that the story of the man who washed his hands in the edge of an Arizona thunder s...hower without wetting his cuffs seems almost credible.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We live by our imaginations, by our admirations, by our sentiments. The child walks amid heaps of illusions, which he does not lik...e to have disturbed. The boy, how sweet to him his fancy! how dear the story of barons and battles! What a hero he is, whilst he feeds on his heroes! What a debt is his to imaginative books!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most of the folktales dealing with the Indians are lurid and romantic. The story of the Indian lovers who were refused permission ...to wed and committed suicide is common to many places. Local residents point out cliffs where Indian maidens leaped to their death until it would seem that the first duty of all Indian girls was to jump off cliffs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Alexander Woollcott broadcasts the story of the wife who returned a dog to the Seeing Eye with this note attached: "I am sending t...he dog back. My husband used to depend on me. Now he is independent, and I never know where he is."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Tell me no more how fair she is, I have no minde to hear... The story of that distant bliss I never shall come near: By sad experience I have found That her perfection is my wound.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Even such is Time, which takes in trust Our youth, our joys, and all we have,... And pays us but with age and dust, Who in the dark and silent grave When we have wandered all our ways Shuts up the story of our days. And from which earth, and grave, and dust, The Lord shall raise me up I trust.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classica...l dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, "memoirs to serve for a history," which is but materials to serve for a mythology.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He will not idly dance at his work who has wood to cut and cord before nightfall in the short days of winter; but every stroke wil...l be husbanded, and ring soberly through the wood; and so will the strokes of that scholar's pen, which at evening record the story of the day, ring soberly, yet cheerily, on the ear of the reader, long after the echoes of his axe have died away.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »