Do not look at wine when it is red, when it sparkles in the cup and goes down smoothly. At the last it bites like a serpent, and s...tings like an adder. Your eyes will see strange things, and your mind utter perverse things. You will be like one who lies down in the midst of the sea, like one who lies on the top of a mast. "They struck me," you will say, "but I was not hurt; they beat me, but I did not feel it. When shall I awake? I will seek another drink."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What do we plant when we plant the tree? We plant the ship that will cross the sea,... We plant the mast to carry the sails, We plant the planks to withstand the gales-- The keel, the keelson, and beam and knee-- We plant the ship when we plant the tree.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Books that have become classics--books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal--always remind me of retired c...olonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,... The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters, The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers, Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees, Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Alas for America as I must so often say, the ungirt, the diffuse, the profuse, procumbent, one wide ground juniper, out of which n...o cedar, no oak will rear up a mast to the clouds! It all runs to leaves, to suckers, to tendrils, to miscellany. The air is loaded with poppy, with imbecility, with dispersion, & sloth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was so old a ship--who knows, who knows? MAnd yet so beautiful, I watched in vain... To see the mast burst open with a rose, And the whole deck put on its leaves again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In many ways, Twain and Waugh were strikingly similar. Even within the group of great humorists, they belong together. Both anti-e...rotic imaginations, they stress male comradeships and represent love-relationships most conventionally and sentimentally. They both show society as dominated by fools and bores, and fate as characterized by betrayal and disaster--life as subordinate to death. For that reason, no doubt, both are much interested in militarism and the machinery of death, as well as in the military and manly virtues. Both men tell jokes that belong to the bar where magistrates gather, managers, captains, men who take responsibility for law and order. Both were quickly irritated by most real clubs and bars. One might say that both belonged to the same cultural type.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If the heart has its reasons, perhaps the body Has its own lumbering sort of carnal spirit,... Felt in the tingling bruises of collision, And known to captains as esprit de corps.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »