Nothing sets a person up more than having something turn out just the way it's supposed to be, like falling into a Swiss snowdrift... and seeing a big dog come up with a little cask of brandy round its neck.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are no such oysters, terrapin, or canvas-back ducks as there were in those days; the race is extinct. It is strange how thin...gs degenerate.... I passed, the other day, the deserted house of Mrs. Gerry, which I used to think so lordly. It stands alone now amid the surrounding sky-scrapers, and reminds me of Don Quixote going out to fight the windmills. It should always remain to mark the difference between the past and the present.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Had I but plenty of money, money enough and to spare, The house for me, no doubt, were a house in the city-square;... Ah, such a life, such a life, as one leads at the window there!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 »
This house was designed and constructed with the freedom of stroke of a forester's axe, without other compass and square than Natu...re uses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I dug my cellar in the side of a hill sloping to the south, where a woodchuck had formerly dug his burrow, down through sumach and... blackberry roots, and the lowest stain of vegetation, six feet square by seven deep, to a fine sand where potatoes would not freeze in any winter.... I took particular pleasure in this breaking of ground, for in almost all latitudes men dig into the earth for an equable temperature. Under the most splendid house in the city is still to be found the cellar where they store their roots as of old, and long after the superstructure has disappeared posterity remark its dent in the earth. The house is still but a sort of porch at the entrance of a burrow.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For what reason have I this vast range and circuit, some square miles of unfrequented forest, for my privacy, abandoned to me by m...en? My nearest neighbor is a mile distant, and no house is visible from any place but the hill-tops within half a mile of my own. I have my horizon bounded by woods all to myself; a distant view of the railroad where it touches the pond on the one hand, and of the fence which skirts the woodland road on the other. But for the most part it is as solitary where I live as on the prairies. It is as much Asia or Africa as New England. I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[The Settlement House] must be grounded in a philosophy whose foundation is on the solidarity of the human race, a philosophy whic...h will not waver when the race happens to be represented by a drunken woman or an idiot boy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The women who take husbands not out of love but out of greed, to get their bills paid, to get a fine house and clothes and jewels;... the women who marry to get out of a tiresome job, or to get away from disagreeable relatives, or to avoid being called an old maid--these are whores in everything but name. The only difference between them and my girls is that my girls gave a man his money's worth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »