Today the two cities seem to stand in contrast to each another. Florence has become a bustling and vital modern city. Whilst it ma...y no longer nurture Michelangelos and Botticellis, there are native Florentine painters of international renown. Its ancient craft of leatherwork plays a distinctive role in contemporary fashion, and Florentines have effectively revived the old skills with stuffs and dyes and organized their distribution on a scale which dwarfs the network of the once ubiquitous Medici banks. Venice instead is apparently a city belonging only to her past, an empty shell of former glories. Its native population diminishes constantly, deserting the island for the industrial wasteland that threatens to destroy what is left of millennial grandeur. Its last remaining industry makes baubles for the tourists who come in droves to stay on a statistical average of eighteen hours, to mill about and to gawk at the remaining relics of the Seremissima's magnificence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
On the thirty-first day of March, one hundred and forty-two years before this, probably about this time in the afternoon, there we...re hurriedly paddling down this part of the river, between the pine woods which then fringed these banks, two white women and a boy, who had left an island at the mouth of the Contoocook before daybreak. They were lightly clad for the season, in the English fashion, and handled their paddles unskillfully, but with nervous energy and determination, and at the bottom of their canoe lay the still bleeding scalps of ten of the aborigines. They were Hannah Dustan, and her nurse, Mary Neff,... and an English boy, named Samuel Lennardson, escaping from captivity among the Indians. On the 15th of March previous, Hannah Dustan had been compelled to rise from childbed, and half dressed, with one foot bare, accompanied by her nurse, commence an uncertain march, in still inclement weather, through the snow and the wilderness. She had seen her seven elder children flee with their father, but knew not of their fate. She had seen her infant's brains dashed out against an apple tree, and had left her own and her neighbors' dwellings in ashes. When she reached the wigwam of her captor, situated on an island in the Merrimack, more than twenty miles above where we now are, she had been told that she and her nurse were soon to be taken to a distant Indian settlement, and there made to run the gauntlet naked.... Having determined to attempt her escape, she instructed the boy to inquire of one of the men, how he should dispatch an enemy in the quickest manner, and take his scalp. "Strike 'em there," said he, placing his finger on his temple, and he also showed him how to take off the scalp. On the morning of the 31st she arose before daybreak, and awoke her nurse and the boy, and taking the Indians' tomahawks, they killed them all in their sleep, excepting one favorite boy, and one squaw who fled wounded with him to the woods. The English boy struck the Indian who had given him the information, on the temple, as he had been directed. They then collected all the provision they could find, and took their master's tomahawk and gun, and scuttling all the canoes but one, commenced their flight to Haverhill, distant about sixty miles by the river. But after having proceeded a short distance, fearing that her story would not be believed if she should escape to tell it, they returned to the silent wigwam, and taking off the scalps of the dead, put them into a bag as proofs of what they had done, and then, retracing their steps to the shore in the twilight, recommenced their voyage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Beware the/easy griefs, that fool and fuel nothing./It is too easy to cry "AFRIKA!"/and shock thy street,/and purse thy mouth,/and... go home to thy "Gunsmoke," to/thy "Gilligan's Island" and the NFL.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon, How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair?... How can ye chant, ye little birds, And I sae weary fu' o' care? Thou'lt break my heart, thou warbling bird, That wantons thro' the flowering thorn: Thou minds me o' departed joys, Departed never to return.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Paul de Bursac: You don't think much of me, Captain Morgan. You're wondering why they have chosen me for this mission. I wonder to...o. As you know, I am not a brave man. On the contrary, I'm always frightened. I wish I could borrow your nature for awhile, Captain. When you meet danger, you never think of anything except how you will circumvent it. The word failure does not even exist for you. While I, I think always, suppose I fail and that I am frightened. Harry Morgan: Yeah, I can easily see how it wouldn't take much courage to get a notorious patriot off Devils' Island. But uh, but just for professional reasons, I'd like to know how you're going to do it. Paul de Bursac: We will find a way. It might fail, and if it does and I'm, I'm still alive, I will try to pass on my information, my mission, to someone else, perhaps to a better man who does not fail. Because there is always someone else. That is the mistake the Germans always make with people they try to destroy. There will be always someone else.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I had been sitting in my mother's house in a small town in Rhode Island watching the Miss America Pageant, as we always did. After... the telecast, I went into the kitchen with my bathrobe tied around by neck singing, "Therrrre She Is, Miss A-mer-i-caaa!" And that very next year I was there on that stage, with God knows how many people watching, and millions of seventeen-year-old women sitting in their living rooms watching the Miss America Pageant. Well, I was so emotionally touched by the whole moment that I was hysterical crying! That I was there, and that there were millions of people watching me, dreaming about doing it someday.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I'm telling the truth. I'm standing at death's door... and even today my sight falls on that thicket on the Tpt's pure banks, just as before.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
High buildings have no genuine advantages, except in speculative gains for banks and land owners. They are not cheaper, they do no...t help create open space, they destroy the townscape, they destroy social life, they promote crime, they make life difficult for children, they are expensive to maintain, they wreck the open spaces near them, and they damage light and air and view.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »