The Ultimate Day really begins the night before, when you sit up until one o'clock trying to get things into trunk and bags. This ...is when you discover the well-known fact that summer air swells articles to twice or three times their original size.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am dead against art's being self-expression. I see an inherent failure in any story which fails to detach itself from the author...--detach itself in the sense that a well-blown soap-bubble detaches itself from the bowl of the blower's pipe and spherically takes off into the air as a new, whole, pure, iridescent world. Whereas the ill-blown bubble, as children know, timidly adheres to the bowl's lip, then either bursts or sinks flatly back again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My friend let loose, and sneezed. The air carefully gathered itself together again, after being locally at odds with prevailing cl...imate and momentarily boycotting the trade winds. The germs were assimilated, like immigrant Jews within the overall commercial prosperity of uniform America. My friend, who had recoiled, was now well distributed in equal blocks of masses behind the reformed nose, whose recent adventure was put aside with even temper as but the sowing of wild oats. The nose, to compensate for its rash act, became a model of decorum, and was elevated as a moral precept: seen, but not heard.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The delicious faces of children, the beauty of school-girls, "the sweet seriousness of sixteen," the lofty air of well-born, well-...bred boys, the passionate histories in the looks and manners of youth and early manhood, and the varied power in all that well-known company that escort us through life,--we know how these forms thrill, paralyze, provoke, inspire, and enlarge us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Well, the world has a million writers. One would think, then, that good thought would be as familiar as air and water, and the gif...ts of each new hour would exclude the last. Yet we can count all our good books; nay, I remember any beautiful verse for twenty years.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue.... Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But Shakspeare has no peculiarity, no importunate topic; but all is duly given; no veins, no curiosities: no cow-painter, no bird-...fancier, no mannerist is he: he has no discoverable egotism: the great he tells greatly; the small, subordinately. He is wise without emphasis or assertion; he is strong, as nature is strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes without effort, and by the same rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and likes as well to do the one as the other. This makes that equality of power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and love-songs; a merit so incessant, that each reader is incredulous of the perception of other readers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For I must tell you, I was given to understand in my childhood, that the British island from which my forefathers came, was no lot...us-garden, no paradise of serene sky and roses and music and merriment all the year round, no, but a cold foggy mournful country, where nothing grew well in the open air, but robust men and virtuous women, and these of a wonderful fibre and endurance; that their best parts were slowly revealed; their virtues did not come out until they quarrelled: they did not strike twelve the first time; good lovers, good haters, and you could know little about them till you had seen them long, and little good of them till you had seen them in action; that in prosperity they were moody and dumpish, but in adversity they were grand.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Not lived; for life doth her great actions spell, By what was done and wrought... In season, and so brought To light: her measures are, how well Each syllab'e answered, and was formed how fair; These make the lines of life, and that's her air.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »