...I think the Americans are the only people who have good beds. I consider the American bedroom unparalleled for freshness, comfo...rt, and cleanliness. It is worth going all over Europe in order to come home to one's own bed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To come down to my own experience, my companion and I ... take pleasure in fancying ourselves as knights of a new, or rather an ol...d, order,--not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or Riders, but Walkers, a still more ancient and honorable class, I trust. The chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged to the Rider seems now to reside in, or perchance to have subsided into, the Walker,--not the Knight, but Walker, Errant. He is a sort of fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Come then to prayers And kneel upon the stone,... For we have tried All courages on these despairs, And are required lastly to give up pride, And the last difficult pride in being humble.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You must ascend a mountain to learn your relation to matter, and so to your own body, for it is at home there, though you are not.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are such beings in the World perhaps, one in a Thousand, as the Creature You and I should think perfection, Where Grace... & Spirit are united to Worth, where the Manners are equal to the Heart & Understanding, but such a person may not come in your way, or if he does, he may not be the eldest son of a Man of Fortune, the Brother of your particular friend & belonging to your own Country.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men look on knowledge which they learn--or might learn--from others as they do on the most beautiful structures which are not thei...r own: in outward objects, they would rather behold their own hogsty than their neighbor's palace; and in mental ones, would prefer one grain of knowledge gained by their own observation to all the wisdom of a thousand Solomons.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...I am useless, one more girl who couldn't be sold. When I visit the family now, I wrap my American successes around me like a pr...ivate shawl. I am worthy of eating the food. From afar I can believe my family loves me fundamentally. They only say, "When fishing for treasures in the flood, be careful not to pull in girls," because that is what one says about daughters. But I watched such words come out of my own mother's and father's mouths; I looked at their ink drawing of poor people snagging their neighbors' flotage with long flood hooks and pushing the girl babies on down the river. And I had to get out of hating range. I read in an anthropology book that Chinese say, "Girls are necessary too"; I have never heard the Chinese I know make this concession. Perhaps it was a saying in another village.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was almost with the feeling of a rider who was wondering whether his horse would make the course that she regarded this body of... hers, which was not only divided from her brain by the necessity of keeping open that cool and dispassionate eye, but separated into compartments of its own. Martha had after all been provided with a map of her flesh by the "book", in which each area was marked by the name of a different physical sensation, so that her mind was anxiously aware, not only of a disconnected partner, a body, but of every part of it, which might or might not come up to scratch at any given occasion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »