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 »
I felt more than ever the necessity of my mission. But I went home out of spirits, I hardly know why. I must work by myself all li...fe long.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The foolish fears of what might happen. I cast them all away... Among the clover-scented grass, Among the new-mown hay, Among the husking of the corn, Where drowsy poppies nod Where ill thoughts die and good are born-- Out in the fields with God.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Dirty fellow!" exclaimed the Captain, seizing both her wrists, "hark you, Mrs. Frog, you'd best hold your tongue; for I must make... bold to tell you, if you don't, that I shall make no ceremony of tripping you out of the window, and there you may lie in the mud till some of your Monseers come to help you out of it."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. ...The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »