You may rely on it that you have the best of me in my books, and that I am not worth seeing personally, the stuttering, blundering... clod-hopper that I am. Even poetry, you know, is in one sense an infinite brag and exaggeration. Not that I do not stand on all that I have written,--but what am I to the truth I feebly utter?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mrs. Van Hopper: Most girls would give their eyes for a chance to see Monte. Maxim de Winter: Wouldn't that rather defeat the... purpose?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A jellyfish and a saurian, And caves where the cave men dwell;... Then a sense of law and beauty, And a face turned from the clod-- Some call it Evolution, And others call it God.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The harbingers are come. See, see their mark: White is their color, and behold my head.... But must they have my brain? Must they dispark Those sparkling notions, which therein were bred? Must dullness turn me to a clod? Yet have they left me, Thou art still my God.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Protoplasm, simple or nucleated, is the formal basis of all life. It is the clay of the potter: which, bake it and paint it as he ...will, remains clay, separated by artifice, and not by nature from the commonest brick or sun-dried clod.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The nearest analogy to Dreiser's "personal realism" is to be found in the painter Edward Hopper, who shares Dreiser's passion for ...transcendent writers, for images of trains and roads. Despite his similar choice of "ordinary" subjects, Hopper has written that his aim "has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature." ... One feels in the awkwardness, the dreaming stillness of Hopper's figures, the same struggle to express the ultimate confrontation of men and things that one does in Dreiser's reverent descriptions of saloons, street-cars, trains, hotels, offices.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The school system, custodian of print culture, has no place for the rugged individual. It is, indeed, the homogenizing hopper into... which we toss our integral tots for processing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;... This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod, and the dilated spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling region of thick-ribbèd ice; To be imprisoned in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendent world; or to be worse than worst Of those that lawless and incertain thought Imagine howling--'tis too horrible! The weariest and most loathèd worldly life That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on nature is a paradise To what we fear of death.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »