There is a tendency to discuss surrealism and cubism as if one proceeds out of the other, but in fact there is no similarity. Cubi...sm was a way of painting that a group of painters imposed on themselves, surrealism a philosophy of life put forward by a band of poets. The first was essentially a method of breaking up the object and putting it together again according to concepts of pictorial structure, a phase of the greatest importance in the development of such painters as Picasso, Braque, Marcoussis, and Gris, but affecting literature only through Apollinaire, and life hardly at all. The second was the attempt of a highly organized group to change life altogether, to make a new kind of man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting ...to us who live in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alligator comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have one other pond just like this, White Pond, in Nine Acre Corner, about two and a half miles westerly; but, though I am acqu...ainted with most of the ponds within a dozen miles of this centre, I do not know a third of this pure and well-like character. Successive nations perchance have drank at, admired, and fathomed it, and passed away, and still its water is green and pellucid as ever. Not an intermitting spring! Perhaps on that spring morning when Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden Walden Pond was already in existence, and even then breaking up in a gentle spring rain accompanied with mist and a southerly wind, and covered with myriads of ducks and geese, which had not heard of the fall, when still such pure lakes sufficed them. Even then it had commenced to rise and fall, and had clarified its waters and colored them of the hue they now wear, and obtained a patent of Heaven to be the only Walden Pond in the world and distiller of celestial dews. Who knows in how many unremembered nations' literatures this has been the Castalian Fountain? or what nymphs presided over it in the Golden Age? It is a gem of the first water which Concord wears in her coronet. Yet perchance the first who came to this well have left some trace of their footsteps. I have been surprised to detect encircling the pond, even where a thick wood has just been cut down on the shore, a narrow shelf-like path in the steep hillside, alternately rising and falling, approaching and receding from the water's edge, as old probably as the race of man here, worn by the feet of aboriginal hunters, and still from time to time unwittingly trodden by the present occupants of the land.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The system was breaking down. The one who had wandered alone past so many happenings and events began to feel, backing up along th...e primal vein that led to his center, the beginning of hiccup that would, if left to gather, explode the center to the extremities of life, the suburbs through which one makes one's way to where the country is.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Good writing is always a breaking of the soil, clearing away prejudices, pulling up of sour weeds of crooked thinking, stripping t...he turf so as to get at what is fertile beneath. It would be amusing to carry the simile further. Those bulbs that flower in the sand and wither! The gay fiction annual that has to be planted again every year! Those experimental plants from Russia, France, and Greenwich Village that are always getting winter killed--confound 'em!--is it worth while planting them again? The stocky perennial that keeps coming up and coming up--so easy to grow and so ugly. Scarlet sage that gives a touch of fiery sin to the edge of the suburbanite's concrete walk! And then the good flowers--as honest as they are beautiful! The well-ordered gar den! The climbing rose that escapes and is the most beautiful of all!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Breaking with old friends is one of the most painful of the changes in all that piling up of a multitude of small distasteful chan...ges that constitutes growing older.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Looked upon with historical objectivity, the Catholic Church as a religion has far better prospects. Consider its unified, world-w...ide papal leadership, the methods of Catholic ecclesiastic thought, and the life-pervading sanctification of existence, both in everyday life and at great moments; add the present glory of a thousand years of art, the multitude of religious activities, the impressive power of priests and religious, spiritually rooted celibates whose existence the faith consumes; top it off with Catholic piety, based on the Church but far from its violence and political cunning, and even spreading a touch of philosophy among the populace--compared with all this, Protestantism seems poor. Yet Protestantism, whatever may be held against it, has one virtue that outweighs all flaws. It is the principle of its birth: the chance of breaking through every religious phenomenon to a new original realization. In Catholic eyes, Protestantism is purely negative. It gives up tenet after tenet, ending in what must seem to a Catholic the total disappearance of all religious essentials--the God-man, the Resurrection, the personal God, the sacraments--and it pulverizes itself by endless internal schisms.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The defects and faults of the mind are like wounds in the body; after all imaginable care has been taken to heal them up, still th...ere will be a scar left behind, and they are in continual danger of breaking the skin and bursting out again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For sex, to me, means the whole of the relationship between man and woman. Now this relationship is far greater than we know. We o...nly know a few crude forms--mistress, wife, mother, sweetheart. The woman is like an idol, or a marionette, always forced to play one role or another.... If only we could break up this fixity, and realize ... that a woman is a flow, a river of life, quite different from a man's river of life: and that each river must flow in its own way, though without breaking its bounds: and that the relation of man to woman is the flowing of two rivers side by side, sometimes mingling, then separating again, and travelling on. The relationship is a life-long change and a life-long travelling.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »