The way a child discovers the world constantly replicates the way science began. You start to notice what's around you, and you ge...t very curious about how things work. How things interrelate. It's as simple as seeing a bug that intrigues you. You want to know where it goes at night; who its friends are; what it eats.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The point of the dragonfly's terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows,... is not that it all fits together like clockwork--for it doesn't ... but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, finged tangle. Freedom is the world's water and weather, the world's nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let Sporus tremble--'What? That thing of silk, Sporus, that mere white curd of ass's milk?... Satire or sense, alas, can Sporus feel, Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?' Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings, This painted child of dirt, that stinks and stings; Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys, Yet wit ne'er tastes, and beauty ne'er enjoys:LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I hear a good deal said about trampling this law under foot. Why, one need not go out of his way to do that. This law rises not to... the level of the head or the reason; its natural habitat is in the dirt. It was born and bred, and has its life, only in the dust and mire, on a level with the feet; and he who walks with freedom, and does not with Hindoo mercy avoid treading on every venomous reptile, will inevitably tread on it, and so trample it under foot,--and Webster, its maker, with it, like the dirt-bug and its ball.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched upla...nds; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks which the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets. Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts,--from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb,--heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festal board,--may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last! I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning- bug and the lightning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Dizzy: Say, don't you think about anything but flying? When did the bug first bite you? Tommy: You remember the day Lindy cam...e back from Paris?... I was only a kid, but I'll never forget it. They wrote "Welcome Home" with smoke across the sky and signed it QB.... I didn't even know what QB meant. Then someone told me about the quiet burglar. Old pilots joining together to help the flying game. I loved that. They seemed apart from ordinary people. Dizzy: Oh they were. That, that first QB hanger was a great place. Each pilot had his own drinking mug, and whenever one got bumped off, they put the mug on the shelf over the bar, bottom up, and your first drink was always a silent toast to the shelf.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »