In the winter of '46-7 there came a hundred men of Hyperborean extraction swoop down on to our pond one morning, with many carload...s of ungainly-looking farming tools.... I did not know whether they had come to sow a crop of winter rye, or some other kind of grain recently introduced from Iceland. As I saw no manure, I judged that they meant to skim the land, as I had done, thinking the soil was deep and had lain fallow long enough. They said that a gentleman farmer, who was behind the scenes, wanted to double his money, which, as I understood, amounted to half a million already; but in order to cover each one of his dollars with another, he took off the only coat, ay, the skin itself, of Walden Pond in the midst of a hard winter.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[The] elderly and timid single gentleman in Paris ... never drove down the Champs Elysees without expecting an accident, and commo...nly witnessing one; or found himself in the neighborhood of an official without calculating the chances of a bomb. So long as the rates of progress held good, these bombs would double in force and number every ten years.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Who will join in the march to the Rocky Mountains with me, a sort of high-pressure-double-cylinder-go-it-ahead-forty-wildcats- tea...rin' sort of a feller?... Git out of this warming-pan, ye holly-hocks, and go out to the West where you may be seen.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When a mother quarrels with a daughter, she has a double dose of unhappiness--hers from the conflict, and empathy with her daughte...r's from the conflict with her. Throughout her life a mother retains this special need to maintain a good relationship with her daughter.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There exists, between people in love, a kind of capital held by each. This is not just a stock of affects or pleasure, but also th...e possibility of playing double or quits with the share you hold in the other's heart.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One should speak of television's cold light, and why it is inoffensive to the imagination (including the imagination of children).... It is innocuous because it no longer conveys an imaginary, for the simple reason that it is no longer an image. Here it contrasts with the cinema which (though increasingly contaminated by television) is still endowed with an intense imaginary--because it is an image. This is not simply to speak of film as a mere screen or visual form, but as a myth, something that still resembles a double, a mirror, a fantasy, a dream, etc. None of this is in the TV image. It doesn't suggest anything, it mesmerizes.... It is only a screen or, better, it is a miniaturized terminal that immediately appears in your head (you are the screen and the television is watching you), transistorizes all your neurons and passes for a magnetic tape--a tape, not an image.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »