Death eats up all things, both the young lamb and old sheep; and I have heard our parson say, death values a prince no more than a... clown; all's fish that comes to his net; he throws at all, and sweeps stakes; he's no mower that takes a nap at noon- day, but drives on, fair weather or foul, and cuts down the green grass as well as the ripe corn: he's neither squeamish nor queesy-stomach'd, for he swallows without chewing, and crams down all things into his ungracious maw; and tho' you can see no belly he has, he has a confounded dropsy, and thirsts after men's lives, which he guggles down like mother's milk.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Truth is one, but error proliferates. Man tracks it down and cuts it up into little pieces hoping to turn it into grains of truth.... But the ultimate atom will always essentially be an error, a miscalculation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The art of writing, like the art of love, runs all the way from a kind of routine hard to distinguish from piling bricks to a kind... of frenzy closely related to delirium tremens. Nearly all the whole of everyday journalism belongs to the former category; it is, in its customary aspects, no more than the reduction of vivid and recent impressions to banal sequences of time-worn words and phrases.... But consider the case of a man sitting down to write something genuinely original--to pump an orderly flow of ideas out of the turbid pool of his impressions, feelings, vague thoughts, dimly sensed instincts. He works in a room alone. Every jangle of the telephone cuts him like a knife; every entrance of a visitor blows him up. Solitary, lonely, tired of himself, wrought up to an abnormal sensitiveness, he wrestles abominably with abnormal complexities.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Before he has learned his a b c in the beautiful but mystic lore of the wilderness which Spenser and Dante had just begun to read,... he cuts it down, coins a pine-tree shilling (as if to signify the pine's value to him), puts up a deestrict schoolhouse, and introduces Webster's spelling book.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Some of us who sit upon this platform have many a time been clamored down, and told that we had no right to speak, and that we wer...e out of our place in public meetings; far be it from us, when women assemble, and a man has a thought in his soul, burning for utterance, to retaliate upon him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »