We read that the traveller asked the boy if the swamp before him had a hard bottom. The boy replied that it had. But presently the... traveller's horse sank in up to the girths, and he observed to the boy, "I thought you said that this bog had a hard bottom." "So it has," answered the latter, "but you have not got half way to it yet." So it is with the bogs and quicksands of society; but he is an old boy that knows it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There where the course is, Delight makes all of the one mind,... The riders upon the galloping horses, The crowd that closes in behind....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer. He had come upon it when already its glory was nearly spent. So in the b...uffalo times a traveller used to come upon the embers of a hunter's fire on the prairies, after the hunter was up and gone; the coals would be trampled out, but the ground was warm, and the flattened grass where he had slept and where his pony had grazed, told the story. This was the very end of the road-making West; the men who had put plains and mountains under the iron harness were old; some were poor, and even the successful ones were hunting for rest and a brief reprieve from death. It was already gone, that age; nothing could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and song of it, the visions those men had seen in the air and followed,--these he had caught in a kind of afterglow in their own faces,--and this would always be his.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can use the pretext of religion to ...mask their true designs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...I had grown up in a world that was dominated by immature age. Not by vigorous immaturity, but by immaturity that was old and ti...red and prudent, that loved ritual and rubric, and was utterly wanting in curiosity about the new and the strange. Its era has passed away, and the world it made has crumbled around us. Its finest creation, a code of manners, has been ridiculed and discarded.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... if there are no waving flags and marching songs at the barricades as Walter marches out with his little battalion, it is not b...ecause the battle lacks nobility. On the contrary, he has picked up in his way, still imperfect and wobbly in his small view of human destiny.... He becomes, in spite of those who are too intrigued with despair and hatred of man to see it, King Oedipus refusing to tear out his eyes, but attacking the oracle instead. He is that last Jewish patriot manning his rifle at Warsaw.... He is Anne Frank, still believing in people; he is the nine small heroes of Little Rock; he is Michelangelo creating David and Beethoven bursting forth with the Ninth Symphony. He is all these things because he has finally reached out in his tiny moment and caught that sweet essence which is human dignity, and it shines like the old star-touched dream that is in his eyes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was the world of Southern, rural, black growing up, of folks sitting on porches day and night, of folks calling your mama, 'cau...se you walked by and didn't speak, and of the switch waiting when you got home so that you could be taught some manners. It was a world of single black older women schoolteachers, dedicated, tough; they had taught your mama, her sisters, and her friends. They knew your people in ways that you never would and shared their insight, keeping us in touch with generations. It was a world where we had a history.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »