Like dreaming, reading performs the prodigious task of carrying us off to other worlds. But reading is not dreaming because books,... unlike dreams, are subject to our will: they envelop us in alternative realities only because we give them explicit permission to do so. Books are the dreams we would most like to have, and, like dreams, they have the power to change consciousness, turning sadness to laughter and anxious introspection to the relaxed contemplation of some other time and place.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you have ever watched an artist constructing with bits of cold stone a beautiful living picture you know that he works faithful...ly and carefully on the pattern from the wrong side and while he is working every inequality, every tint a little too dull is apparent to him as his picture grows, but he works on and on. And even when he finishes at last and looks down at the completed pattern he is not discouraged to see here a little crevice and there a little roughness, an open seam here, a tiny patch there where the bit of marble was too small. Now he pours his cement over it and smoothes [sic] it into every seam, and with faith puts his work to dry. Next day the pattern is turned and the perfect whole is given to view, needing only the polishing of a loving hand to make it ready to slip in place. So we should work faithfully on our pattern, cement it together with ourselves, and polish it with human kindness; and lo! the work slips into place seemingly a perfect whole.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Look at this poet William Carlos Williams: he is primitive and native, and his roots are in raw forest and violent places; he is w...ord-sick and place-crazy. He admires strength, but for what? Violence! This is the cult of the frontier mind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Spirit of Place [does not] exert its full influence upon a newcomer until the old inhabitant is dead or absorbed. So America....... The moment the last nuclei of Red [Indian] life break up in America, then the white men will have to reckon with the full force of the demon of the continent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen... once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A completely indifferent attitude toward clothes in women seems to me to be an admission of inferiority, of perverseness, or of a ...lack of realization of her place in the world as a woman. Or--what is even more hopeless and pathetic--it's an admission that she has given up, that she is beaten, and refuses longer to stand up to the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »