Now you know very well that there are no less than fifty-eight different pieces in a violin. These pieces are strangers to each ot...her, and it takes a century, more or less, to make them thoroughly acquainted. At last they learn to vibrate in harmony, and the instrument becomes an organic whole, as if it were a great seed-capsule which had grown from a garden-bed in Cremona, or elsewhere. Besides, the wood is juicy and full of sap for fifty years or so, but at the end of fifty or hundred years gets tolerably dry and comparatively resonant. Don't you see that all this is just as true of a poem? Counting each word as a piece, there are more pieces in an average copy of verses than in a violin. The poet has forced all these words together, and fastened them, and they don't understand it at first. But let the poem be repeated aloud and murmured over in the mind's muffled whisper often enough, and at length the parts become knit together in such absolute solidarity that you could not change a syllable without the whole world's crying out against you for meddling with the harmonious fabric. Observe, too, how the drying process takes place in the stuff of a poem just as in that of a violin.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not generally remembered, if known, by the descendants of the Pilgrims, that when their forefathers were spending their firs...t memorable winter in the New World, they had for neighbors a colony of French no further off than Port Royal (Annapolis, Nova Scotia) ... where, in spite of many vicissitudes, they had been for fifteen years.... Though these founders of Acadie endured no less than the Pilgrims, and about the same proportion of them ... died the first winter at St. Croix, 1604-1605, sixteen years earlier, no orator, to my knowledge, has ever celebrated their enterprise ... while the trials which their successors and descendants endured at the hands of the English have furnished a theme for both the historian and poet.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My friends, you have seen this incident, based on sworn testimony. Can you prove that it didn't happen? Perhaps on your way home, ...someone will pass you in the dark. And you will never know it, for they will be from outer space. Many scientists believe that another world is watching us this moment. We once laughed at the horseless carriage, the airplane, the telephone, the electric light, vitamins, radio and even television. And now some of us laugh at outer space. God help us in the future.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I suppose it would be nice to say ... that ... I realized I was making abortion-rights history.... But the honest truth is that no...thing like that even occurred to me. I was simply at the end of my rope. At a dead end. I just didn't know what else to do.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is sad, no doubt, to exhaust one's strength and one's days in cleaving the bosom of this jealous earth, which compels us to wri...ng from it the treasures of its fertility, when a bit of the blackest and coarsest bread is, at the end of the day's work, the sole recompense and the sole profit attaching to so arduous a toil.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Think of him,--of his rare qualities!--such a man as it takes ages to make, and ages to understand; no mock hero, nor the represen...tative of any party. A man such as the sun may not rise upon again in this benighted land. To whose making went the costliest material, the finest adamant; sent to be the redeemer of those in captivity; and the only use to which you can put him is to hang him at the end of a rope! You who pretend to care for Christ crucified, consider what you are about to do to him who offered himself to be the saviour of four millions of men.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Abbe Goussault, a counsellor at High Court, writes [at the end of the 17th century]: "Familiarizing oneself with one's childre...n, getting them to talk about all manner of things, treating them as sensible people and winning them over with sweetness, is an infallible secret for doing what one wants with them. . . . A few caresses, a few little presents, a few words of cordiality and trust make an impression on their minds, and they are few in number that resist these sweet and easy methods of making them persons of honour and probity."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When you're at the end of your rope, all you have to do is make one foot move out in front of the other. Just take the next step. ...That's all there is to it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »