But ice-crunching and loud gum-chewing, together with drumming on tables, and whistling the same tune seventy times in succession,... because they indicate an indifference on the part of the perpetrator to the rest of the world in general, are not only registered on the delicate surfaces of the brain but eat little holes in it until it finally collapses or blows up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When a daughter tries suicide and the chimney falls down like a drunk... and the dog chews her tail off and the kitchen blows up its shiny kettle and the vacuum cleaner swallows its bag and the toilet washes itself in tears ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
According to fiction, the hillman is a seven-foot combination of malnutrition and hookworm, asleep on his front porch with the dog...s. His great bare feet, dangling off the porch, flap from time to time when the flies get too pesky, but nothing awakens him except a hound's salute to a stranger. Then he shoots up his astounding neck to its full length, ogles the visitor, and on his hunting horn blows a series of long and short blasts that means, "Hide yore stills and oil yore guns; they air a stranger h'yar."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... this nation is rotten at the heart, and ... nothing but the most tremendous blows with the sledge-hammer of abolition truth, c...ould ever have broken the false rest which we had taken up for ourselves on the very brink of ruin.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nobody in this army thinks of giving up to Rebels their fugitive slaves. Union men might perhaps be differently dealt with--probab...ly would be.... The man who repudiates all obligations under the Constitution and laws of the United States is to be treated as having forfeited those rights which depend solely on the laws and the Constitution. I don't want to see Congress meddling with the slavery question. Time and the progress of events are solving all the questions arising out of slavery in a way consistent with eternal principles of justice. Slavery is getting death blows. As an "institution" it perishes in this war. It will take years to get rid of its debris, but the "sacred" is gone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Re...ason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Even such is man, whose borrowed light Is straight called in, and paid to night....
The wind blows out, the bubble dies; The spring entombed in autumn lies; The dew dries up, the star is shot; The flight is past: and man forgot.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world's vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and then, with weary p...atience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when--Thar she blows!--the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life's old routine again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The art of writing, like the art of love, runs all the way from a kind of routine hard to distinguish from piling bricks to a kind... of frenzy closely related to delirium tremens. Nearly all the whole of everyday journalism belongs to the former category; it is, in its customary aspects, no more than the reduction of vivid and recent impressions to banal sequences of time-worn words and phrases.... But consider the case of a man sitting down to write something genuinely original--to pump an orderly flow of ideas out of the turbid pool of his impressions, feelings, vague thoughts, dimly sensed instincts. He works in a room alone. Every jangle of the telephone cuts him like a knife; every entrance of a visitor blows him up. Solitary, lonely, tired of himself, wrought up to an abnormal sensitiveness, he wrestles abominably with abnormal complexities.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I was about thy years, Hal, I was not an eagle's talon in the waist, I could have crept into any alderman's thumb-ring. ...A plague of sighing and grief, it blows a man up like a bladder.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »