This hard work will always be done by one kind of man; not by scheming speculators, nor by soldiers, nor professors, nor readers o...f Tennyson; but by men of endurance--deep-chested, long- winded, tough, slow and sure, and timely.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No one would know except for ancient maps That such a brook ran water. But I wonder... If from its being kept forever under, The thoughts may not have risen that so keep This new-built city from both work and sleep.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The farmhouse lingers, though averse to square With the new city street it has to wear... A number in. But what about the brook That held the house as in an elbow-crook?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It must be the brook Can trust itself to go by contraries... The way I can with you--and you with me-- Because we're--we're--I don't know What we are.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our life runs down in sending up the clock. The brook runs down in sending up our life.... The sun runs down in sending up the brook. And there is something sending up the sun.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Speaking of contraries, see how the brook In that white wave runs counter to itself.... It is from that in water we were from Long, long before we were from any creature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The true novel wrestles on the edge of understanding, lying about on all sides desperately, for every sort of experience, pressing... into use every flash of intuition or correspondence, trying to fuse together the crudest of materials, and the humblest, which the higher arts can't include. But it is precisely here, where the writer fights with the raw, the intractable, that poetry is born. Poetry, that is, of the novel: appropriate to it. The Story of an African Farm is a poetic novel; and when one has done with the "plot" and the characters, that is what remains: an endeavor, a kind of hunger, that passionate desire for growth and understanding, which is the deepest pulse of human beings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...it's dynamite to spend future earnings. I have had a taste of it myself, and it's mighty bitter. A debt is a debt, whether it's... margins or mortgages; and debts are all the same, no matter how you try to camouflage 'em. You never get much out of 'em except trouble. On the farm or in Wall Street, if you use the other fellow's money, it costs you a lot more than it's worth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »