He saw Mr. Lincoln but once; at the melancholy function called an Inaugural Ball. Of course he looked anxiously for a sign of char...acter. He saw a long, awkward figure; a plain, ploughed face; a mind, absent in part, and in part evidently worried by white kid gloves; features that expressed neither self-satisfaction nor any other familiar Americanism, but rather the same painful sense of becoming educated and of needing education that tormented a private secretary, above all a lack of apparent force. Any private secretary in the least fit for his business would have thought, as Adams did, that no man living needed so much education as the new President but that all the education he could get would not be enough.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The roaring alongside he takes for granted, and that every so often the world is bound to shake.... He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward, in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Since childhood, I have been enchanted by the fact and the symbolism of the right hand and the left--the one the doer, the other t...he dreamer. The right is order and lawfulness, le droit. Its beauties are those of geometry and taut implication. Reaching for knowledge with the right hand is science. Yet to say only that much of science is to overlook one of its excitements, for the great hypotheses of science are gifts carried in the right hand. Of the left hand we say that it is awkward and, while it has been proposed that art students can seduce their proper hand to more expressiveness by drawing first with the left, we nonetheless suspect this function. The French speak of the illegitimate descendent as being à main gauche, and, though the heart is virtually at the center of the thoracic cavity, we listen for it on the left. Sentiment, intuition, bastardy. And should we say that reaching for knowledge with the left hand is art? Again it is not enough, for as surely as the recital of a daydream differs from the well-wrought tale, there is a barrier between undisciplined fantasy and art. To climb the barrier requires a right hand adept at technique and artifice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[Mark Twain] is still the rough, awkward, good-natured boy who swore at the deck hands when he was three years old. Thoroughly lik...eable as a good fellow, but impossible as a man of letters.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is uncomfortable to ask condemned people about their sentences just as it is awkward to ask wealthy people why they need so muc...h money, why they use their wealth so poorly, and why they don't just get rid of it when they recognize that it is the cause of their unhappiness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men are much more unwilling to have their weaknesses and their imperfections known, than their crimes; and, if you hint to a man t...hat you think him silly, ignorant or even ill-bred or awkward, he will hate you more and longer than it you tell him plainly that you think him a rogue.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Americans think of themselves collectively as a huge rescue squad on twenty-four-hour call to any spot on the globe where dispute ...and conflict may erupt.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While the light burning within may have been divine, the outer case of the lamp was assuredly cheap enough. Whitman was, from firs...t to last, a boorish, awkward poseur.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When you take a light perspective, it's easier to step back and relax when your child doesn't walk until fifteen months, . . . is ...not interested in playing ball, wants to be a cheerleader, doesn't want to be a cheerleader, has clothes strewn in the bedroom, has difficulty making friends, hates piano lessons, is awkward and shy, reads books while you are driving through the Grand Canyon, gets caught shoplifting, flunks Spanish, has orange and purple hair, or is lesbian or gay.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »