There is nothing here [Civita Vecchia] to see. They have not even a cathedral, with eleven tons of solid silver archbishops in the... back room; and they do not show you any moldy buildings that are seven thousand years old; nor any smoke-dried old fire-screens which are chef d'oeuvres of Rubens or Simpson, or Titian or Ferguson, or any of those parties; and they haven't any bottled fragments of saints, and not even a nail from the true cross. We are going to Rome. There is nothing to see here.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in ...the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Look, we're all the same; a man is a fourteen-room house--in the bedroom he's asleep with his intelligent wife, in the living-room... he's rolling around with some bareass girl, in the library he's paying his taxes, in the yard he's raising tomatoes, and in the cellar he's making a bomb to blow it all up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He made no resistance whatever, and was stabbed in the back.... I must not dwell upon the fearful repast.... Words have no power t...o impress the mind with the exquisite horror of their reality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In fact, the deeper you penetrate into the woods, the more intelligent, and, in one sense, less countrified do you find the inhabi...tants; for always the pioneer has been a traveler, and, to some extent, a man of the world; and, as the distances with which he is familiar are greater, so is his information more general and far reaching than the villager's. If I were to look for a narrow, uninformed, and countrified mind, as opposed to the intelligence and refinement which are thought to emanate from cities, it would be among the rusty inhabitants of an old-settled country, on farms all run out and gone to seed with life-everlasting, in the towns about Boston, even on the high-road in Concord, and not in the back woods of Maine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Marriage accustomed one to the good things, so one came to take them for granted, but magnified the bad things, so they came to fe...el as painful as a grain in one's eye. An open window, a forgotten quart of milk, a TV set left blaring, socks on the bathroom floor could become occasions for incredible rage. And something happened sexually in marriage--the swearing to forsake all others, despite its slight observance, had a profound effect. Some people felt trapped by it, impelled to assert what they called freedom. Some accepted it like a rein, and in the effort to avoid pain in the form of hopeless desire, cut off occasions of desire, avoided having long talks at parties with attractive members of the opposite sex. In time, all feeling for the opposite sex was cut off, and intercourse limited to the barest politenesses.... But something happened to you when you did that, a kind of death seeped up from the genitals to the rest of the body, till it showed in the eyes, the gestures, in a certain lifelessness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Honestly, the real trouble is ... a gang which unfortunately survives--made up mostly of those who were isolationists before Decem...ber seventh and who are actuated today by various motives in their effort to instill disunity in the country.... The best comment I have heard was by Elmer Davis.... "Some people want the United States to win so long as England loses. Some people want the United States to win so long as Russia loses. Some people want the United States to win so long as Roosevelt loses."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That was always the difference between Muhammad Ali and the rest of us. He came, he saw, and if he didn't entirely conquer--he cam...e as close as anybody we are likely to see in the lifetime of this doomed generation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »