The heart of Paris is like nothing so much as the unending interior of a house. Buildings become furniture, courtyards become carp...ets and arrases, the streets are like galleries, the boulevards conservatories. It is a house, one or two centuries old, rich, bourgeois, distinguished. The only way of going out, or shutting the door behind you, is to leave the centre.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Paradoxically, the freedom of Paris is associated with a persistent belief that nothing ever changes. Paris, they say, is the city... that changes least. After an absence of twenty or thirty years, one still recognizes it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The hurry of life in the Western part of the country, the rapidity, energy, and enterprise with which civilization is there being ...carried forward baffles all description, and, I think, can hardly be believed but by those who have seen it. Cities of magnificent streets and houses, with wharves, and quays, and warehouses, and storehouses, and shops full of Paris luxuries, and railroads from and to them in every direction, and land worth its weight in gold by the foot, and populations of fifty and hundreds of thousands, where, within the memory of men, no trace of civilization existed, but the forest grew and the savage wandered.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The shortest way out of Manchester is notoriously a bottle of Gordon's gin; out of any businessman's life there is the mirage of P...aris; out of Paris, or mediocrity of talent and imagination, there are all the drugs, from subtle, all-conquering opium to cheating, cozening cocaine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A poet can read. A poet can write. A poet is African in Africa, or Irish in Ireland, or French on the left bank of Paris, or white... in Wisconsin. A poet writes in her own language. A poet writes of her own people, her own history, her own vision, her own room, her own house where she sits at her own table quietly placing one word after another word until she builds a line and a movement and an image and a meaning that somersaults all of these into the singing, the absolutely individual voice of the poet: at liberty. A poet is somebody free. A poet is someone at home. How should there be Black poets in America?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »