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 »
You shall observe the festival of harvest, of the first fruits of your labor, of what you sow in the field. You shall observe the ...festival of ingathering at the end of the year, when you gather in from the field the fruit of your labor.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[T]he minister preached a sermon on Jonah and the whale, at the end of which an old chief arose and declared, "We have heard sever...al of the white people talk and lie; we know they will lie, but this is the biggest lie we ever heard."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
With its frame of shaking curls all in disarray, earrings swinging,... make-up smudged by beads of sweat, eyes languid at the end of lovemaking, may the face of the slim girl who's riding on top of you protect you long. What's the use of Vishnu, Shiva, Skanda, and all those other gods?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Tired, she looked up the path... her lover would take as far as her eyes could see. On the roads, traffic ceased at the end of day as night slid over the sky. The traveller's pained wife took a single step towards home, said, "Could he not have come at this instant?" and quickly craning her neck around, looked up the path again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »