The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air- conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the... middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murde...rous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man's death makes everything certain about him. Of course, secrets may die with him. And of course, a hundred years later somebo...dy looking through some papers may discover a fact which throws a totally different light on his life and of which all the people who attended his funeral were ignorant. Death changes the facts qualitatively but not quantitatively. One does not know more facts about a man because he is dead. But what one already knows hardens and becomes definite. We cannot hope for ambiguities to be clarified, we cannot hope for further change, we cannot hope for more. We are now the protagonists and we have to make up our minds.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Vermont is a state I love. I could not look upon the peaks of Ascutney, Killington and Mansfield without being moved in a way that... no other scene could move me. It was here that I first saw the light of day, here that I received my bride. Here my dead lie buried, pillowed among the everlasting hills. I love Vermont because of her hills and valleys, her scenery and invigorating climate, but most of all, I love her because of her indomitable people. They are a race of pioneers who almost impoverished themselves for love of others. If ever the spirit of liberty should vanish from the rest of the Union, it could be restored by the generous share held by the people in this brave little State of Vermont.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Baudelaire compared the great names in art to lighthouses posted along the track of historic time. The simile, as he used it, seiz...es the imagination and represents a great truth, but it allows of an interpretation which the limits of a sonnet form forbade him to develop. He takes the lights of his beacons as much for granted as the sailor does the lights of real lighthouses. But the lighthouses of art do not burn with so fixed and unvarying a lustre. The light they give is always changing insensibly with each generation, now brighter, now dimmer, and often enough growing bright once more. But we sometimes forget that the lights have to be tended or they grow faint and may expire altogether. For them to burn brightly, they must be fed by the devotion of some few spirits in each generation. If that fails for a long period they go out and become one of those dead, ineffectual names which still linger on, obstructions rather than aids to the historical voyager.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hard-hearted minds relent and rigor's tears abound, And envy strangely rues his end, in whom no fault was found.... Knowledge her light hath lost, valor hath slain her knight, Sidney is dead, dead is my friend, dead is the world's delight.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Holinesse on the head, Light and perfections on the breast,... Harmonious bells below, raising the dead To leade them unto life and rest. Thus are true Aarons drest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I almost think we're all of us Ghosts, Pastor Manders. It's not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that "walks..." in us. It's all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can't get rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see Ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be Ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sand of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The march interrupted the light afternoon. Cars stopped dead, children began to run,... As out of the street-shadow into the sun Discipline strode....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »