I am sure I do not know why the beauty of Monte Carlo should not satisfy more than it does. The bluest of all seas is nowhere blue...r than when you see it between the marble balustrades of the long white terrace before the casino, palms are nowhere greener than in that high garden which the mountain screen from every unkind breath, no colours could be more rich and various than those of the red and purple Alps that tower up behind the town, on whose summit such violent thunderstorms gather and break. But for me, at least, there was not at all the pleasure I had anticipated in this dazzling white and blue, these feathery palms and ragged Alps. ...I had a continual restless feeling that there was nothing at all real about Monte Carlo; that the sea was too blue to be wet, the casino too white to be anything but pasteboard, and that from their very greenness the palms must be cotton. ... in atmosphere and spirit the entire kingdom of Monaco is an extension of the casino.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Don't you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more ...pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky? When you are cold and wet what else can warm you? Before an attack who can say anything that gives you the momentary well-being that rum does?... The only time it isn't good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold. But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I can live without it all-- love with its blood pump,... sex with its messy hungers, men with their peacock strutting, their silly sexual baggage, their wet tongues in my ear.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have a vocabulary all my own. I "pass the time" when it is wet and disagreeable. When it is fine I do not wish to pass it; I rum...inate it and hold on to it. We should hasten over the bad, and settle upon the good.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I can't say much for the women though. But oh, the girls. All Malayan females should be poisoned at twenty-one. Before that they'r...e--mmmh!... Oh yes, they're dark. But the longer you're there, the whiter they get. Well that's the way it seems.... I'll never forget the first time I saw them. We sailed into a little harbor about sundown, and the girls came swimming out. Flowers in their long hair. Singing and laughing upward through the water. Brown skinned. It seemed like gold to me. A richer, deeper gold than any metal. I can see that gold shimmer even now on their wet bodies. And they swam like mermaids to the rail and climbed on board. Laughing at us like a bunch of shameless imps.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There stands a gig in the gray morning, in the mist, the impatient traveler pacing the wet shore with whip in hand, and shouting t...hrough the fog after the regardless Charon and his retreating ark, as if he might throw that passenger overboard and return forthwith for himself; he will compensate him. He is to break his fast at some unseen place on the opposite side. It may be Ledyard or the Wandering Jew. Whence, pray, did he come out of the foggy night? and wither through the sunny day will he go? We observe only his transit; important to us, forgotten by him, transiting all day.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Many waves are there agitated by the wind, keeping nature fresh, the spray blowing in your face, reeds and rushes waving; ducks by... the hundred, all uneasy in the surf, in the raw wind, just ready to rise, and now going off with a clatter and a whistling like riggers straight for Labrador, flying against the stiff gale with reefed wings, or else circling round first, with all their paddles briskly moving, just over the surf, to reconnoitre you before they leave these parts; gulls wheeling overhead, muskrats swimming for dear life, wet and cold, with no fire to warm them by that you know of, their labored homes rising here and there like haystacks; and countless mice and moles and winged titmice along the sunny, windy shore; cranberries tossed on the waves and heaving up on the beach, their little red skiffs beating among the alders;Msuch healthy natural tumult as proves the last day is not yet at hand.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sometimes we met a wrecker with his cart and dog,--and his dog's faint bark at us wayfarers, heard through the roaring of the surf..., sounded ridiculously faint. To see a little trembling dainty-footed cur stand on the margin of the ocean, and ineffectually bark at a beach-bird, amid the roar of the Atlantic! Come with design to bark at a whale, perchance! That sound will do for farmyards. All the dogs looked out of place there, naked and as if shuddering at the vastness; and I thought that they would not have been there had it not been for the countenance of their masters. Still less could you think of a cat bending her steps that way, and shaking her wet foot over the Atlantic; yet even this happens sometimes, they tell me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I picked up a bottle half buried in the wet sand, covered with barnacles, but stoppled tight, and half full of red ale, which stil...l smacked of juniper,--all that remained I fancied from the wreck of a rowdy world,--that great salt sea on the one hand, and this little sea of ale on the other, preserving their separate characters. What if it could tell us its adventures over countless ocean waves! Man could not be man through such ordeals as it had passed. But as I poured it slowly out on to the sand, it seemed to me that man himself was like a half-emptied bottle of pale ale, which Time had drunk so far, yet stoppled tight for a while, and drifting about in the ocean of circumstances, but destined ere-long to mingle with the surrounding waves, or be spilled amid the sands of a distant shore.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »