You don't want a general houseworker, do you? Or a traveling companion, quiet, refined, speaks fluent French entirely in the prese...nt tense? Or an assistant billiard-maker? Or a private librarian? Or a lady car-washer? Because if you do, I should appreciate your giving me a trial at the job. Any minute now, I am going to become one of the Great Unemployed. I am about to leave literature flat on its face. I don't want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ah, the pickerel of Walden! when I see them lying on the ice, or in the well which the fisherman cuts in the ice, making a little ...hole to admit the water, I am always surprised by their rare beauty, as if they were fabulous fishes, they are so foreign to the streets, even to the woods, foreign as Arabia to our Concord life. They possess a quite dazzling and transcendent beauty ... as if they were the pearls, the animalized nuclei or crystals of the Walden water. They, of course, are Walden all over and all through; are themselves small Waldens in the animal kingdom, Waldenses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No man, said Birkin, cuts another man's throat unless he wants to cut it, and unless the other man wants it cutting. This is a com...plete truth. It takes two people to make a murder: a murderer and a murderee.... And a man who is murderable is a man who has in a profound if hidden lust desires to be murdered.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find Englishmen doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong.... He does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles; he bullies you on manly principles; he supports his king on loyal principles and cuts off his king's head on republican principles. His watchword is always Duty; and he never forgets that the nation which lets its duty get on the opposite side to its interest is lost.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 »
We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcæ, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Pari...s puts on a traveller's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A good neighbour, even in this, Is fatal sometimes, cuts your morning up... To mince-meat of the very smallest talk, Then helps to sugar her bohea at night With your reputation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge... Through living roots awaken in my head. But I've no spade to follow men like them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In frames as large as rooms that face all ways And block the ends of streets with giant loaves,... Screen graves with custard, cover slums with praise Of motor-oil and cuts of salmon, shine Perpetually these sharply-pictured groves Of how life should be.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »