I should consent to breed under pressure, if I were convinced in any way of the reasonableness of reproducing the species. But my ...nerves and the nerves of any woman I could live with three months, would produce only a victim ... lacking in impulse, a mere bundle of discriminations. If I were wealthy I might subsidize a stud of young peasants, or a tribal group in Tahiti.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Man torturing man is a fiend beyond description. You turn a corner in the dark and there he is. You congeal into a bundle of inani...mate fear. You become the very soul of anaesthesia. But there is no escaping him. It is your turn now.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He holds the wire from this box of nerves Praising the moral error... Of birth and death, the two sad knaves of thieves, And the hunger's emperor; He pulls the chain, the cistern moves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
From an old ruined fort on Staten Island, I have loved to watch all day some vessel whose name I had read in the morning through t...he telegraph glass, when she first came upon the coast, and her hull heaved up and glistened in the sun, from the moment when the pilot and most adventurous news-boats met her, past the Hook, and up the narrow channel of the wide bay, till she was boarded by the health officer, and took her station at quarantine, or held on her unquestioned course to the wharves of New York. It was interesting, too, to watch the less adventurous newsman, who made his assault as the vessel swept through the Narrows, defying plague and quarantine law, and, fastening his little cockboat to her huge side, clambered up and disappeared in the cabin. And then I could imagine what momentous news was being imparted by the captain, which no American ear had ever heard, that Asia, Africa, Europe--were all sunk; for which at length he pays the price, and is seen descending the ship's side with his bundle of newspapers,... to dispose of his wares to the highest bidder, and we shall ere long read something startling,--"By the latest arrival,"M"by the good ship--M."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The ferry here took us past the Indian island. As we left the shore, I observed a short, shabby, washerwoman-looking Indian,--they... commonly have the woebegone look of the girl that cried for spilt milk,--just from "up river," land on the Oldtown side near a grocery, and, drawing up his canoe, take out a bundle of skins in one hand, and an empty keg or half-barrel in the other, and scramble up the bank with them. This picture will do to put before the Indian's history, that is, the history of his extinction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is at the same time by poetry and through poetry, by and through music, that the soul glimpses the splendors found behind the t...omb; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to one's eyes, these tears are not the sign of excessive pleasure, they are rather witness to an irritated melancholy, to a condition of nerves, to a nature exiled to imperfection and which would like to seize immediately, on this very earth, a revealed paradise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Your well-tempered guiding effort keeps your adventurous, enthusiastic, active ever-learning toddler from becoming passive, docile..., and limp, without drive, will to learn, or interest in your company. Your skillful handling keeps her from turning into a bundle of rebellion and unfocused negativism, getting her kicks out of grownups' anger rather than their pleasure and approval. And with experience and growing understanding she gradually learns how to operate relatively easily and peacefully in the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Life is a series of diminishments. Each cessation of an activity either from choice or some other variety of infirmity is a death,... a putting to final rest. Each loss, of friend or precious enemy, can be equated with the closing off of a room containing blocks of nerves ... and soon after the closing off the nerves atrophy and that part of oneself, in essence, drops away. The self is lightened, is held on earth by a gram less of mass and will.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »