"Would you--be good enough--" Alice panted out, after running a little further, "to stop a minute--just to get--one's breath again...?" "I'm good enough," the King said, "only I'm not strong enough. You see, a minute goes by so fearfully quick. You might as well try to stop a Bandersnatch!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Not fear but a stirring... of wonder makes me catch my breath when I feel the tug of it when I thought it had loosened itself and gone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If nature has commanded that of all the animals, infancy shall last longest in human beings--it is because nature knows how many r...ivers there are to cross and paths to retrace. Nature provides time for mistakes to be corrected (by both children and adults), for prejudices to overcome, and for children to catch their breath and restore their image of themselves, peers, parents, teachers, and the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is grey in your hair. Young men no longer suddenly catch their breath... When you are passing; But maybe some old gaffer mutters a blessing Because it was your prayer Recovered him upon the bed of death.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that we...re real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.... Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If one had to worry about one's actions in respect of other people's ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or mar...ried to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How ignorant we are! How ignorant everyone is! We can cut across only a small area of the appallingly expanding fields of knowledg...e. No human being can know more than a tiny fraction of the whole. It must have been satisfactory in ancient times when one's own land seemed to be the universe; when research studies, pamphlets, books did not issue in endless flow; when laboratories and scientists were not so rapidly pushing back frontiers of knowledge that the process of unlearning the old left you gasping for breath.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is no passion more dominant and instinctive in the human spirit than the need of the country to which one belongs.... The ti...me comes when nothing in the world is so important as a breath of one's own particular climate. If it were one's last penny it would be used for that return passage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Go, and catch a falling star, Get with child a mandrake root,... Tell me, where all past years are, Or who cleft the devil's foot, Teach me to her mermaids singing, Or to keep off envy's stinging, And find What wind Serves to advance an honest mind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »