Any owner of cats will know of what I speak. Cats come at dawn to sit on your bed. They may not nip your nose or inhale your breat...h or make a sound. They simply sit there and stare at you until you open one eyelid and spy them there about to drop dead for need of feeding. So it is with ideas. They come silently in the hour of trying to wake up and remember my name. The notions and fancies sit on the edge of my wits, whisper in my ears and then, if I don't rouse, give more than cats give: a good knock in the head, which gets me out and down to my typewriter before the ideas flee or die or both. In any event, I make the ideas come to me. I do not go to them. I provoke their patience by pretending disregard. This infuriates the latent creature until it is almost raving to be born and once born, nourished.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 »
It's a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue and, moreover, you can time any little ir...regularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don't see or care.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My bangles left. My best friends, tears,... went on forever. My self-control wouldn't sit still for a minute. My mind made itself up to go on ahead. When my man made up his mind to go, everything else went, just like him. Life, if you must go, too, then don't forsake your entourage of friends.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Father, hear my prayer. Forgive him. As you have forgiven all your children who have sinned. Don't turn your face from him. He did...n't know what he was doing. Bring him at last to rest in your peace ... which he could never have found ... here.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the range of things toddlers have to learn and endlessly review--why you can't put bottles with certain labels in your mouth, w...hy you have to sit on the potty, why you can't take whatever you want in the store, why you don't hit your friends--by the time we got to why you can't drop your peas, well, I was dropping a few myself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and ...lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of a televion set.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »