Our down East friends, did, indeed, treat me with great kindness, demonstrating what I before believed, that all good, intelligent... people are very much alike.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I noticed occasionally very long troughs which supplied the road with water, and my companion said that three dollars annually wer...e granted by the State to one man in each school-district, who provided and maintained a suitable water-trough by the roadside, for the use of travelers,--a piece of intelligence as refreshing to me as the water itself. That legislature did not sit in vain. It was an Oriental act, which made me wish that I was still farther down East,--another Maine law, which I hope we may get in Massachusetts. That State is banishing bar-rooms from its highways, and conducting the mountain springs thither.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Again and again, I struggled though the storm. Once I fainted--and it wasn't in the script. I was hauled to the studio on a sled, ...thawed out with hot tea, and then brought back to the blizzard, where the others were waiting. We filmed all day and all night, stopping only to eat standing near a bonfire. We never went inside.... The blizzard never slackened.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you are one of the hewers of wood and drawers of small weekly paychecks, your letters will have to contain some few items of ne...ws or they will be accounted dry stuff.... But if you happen to be of a literary turn of mind, or are, in any way, likely to become famous, you may settle down to an afternoon of letter-writing on nothing more sprightly in the way of news than the shifting of the wind from south to south-east.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You'd have to be a jew like me to understand. You've heard of the Pale. Every one of us has something fenced up way down in us. We...'ve been in prison for two thousand years. I have the mind of a jailbird, that's why prison can't hurt me. That's why we throw ourselves into every movement of freedom. That's why I feel the slavery of the workers, I feel it as a worker and I feel it as a jew. Oh you can't imagine the overheated stuffiness of life at home on the East Side when I was a kid. We were all jailed in poverty and Judaism and in old customs and hatreds and wornout laws.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are few books which are fit to be remembered in our wisest hours, but the Iliad is brightest in the serenest days, and embod...ies still all the sunlight that fell on Asia Minor. No modern joy or ecstasy of ours can lower its height or dim its lustre, but there it lies in the east of literature, as it were the earliest and latest production of the mind. The ruins of Egypt oppress and stifle us with their dust, foulness preserved in cassia and pitch, and swathed in linen; the death of that which never lived. But the rays of Greek poetry struggle down to us, and mingle with the sunbeams of the recent day. The statue of Memnon is cast down, but the shaft of the Iliad still meets the sun in his rising.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was interesting, when awakened at midnight, to watch the grotesque and fiend-like forms and motions of some one of the party, w...ho, not being able to sleep, had got up silently to arouse the fire.... Thus aroused, I, too, brought fresh fuel to the fire, and then rambled along the sandy shore in the moonlight, hoping to meet a moose come down to drink, or else a wolf. The little rill tinkled the louder, and peopled all the wilderness for me; and the glassy smoothness of the sleeping lake, laving the shores of a new world, with the dark, fantastic rocks rising here and there from its surface, made a scene not easily described. It has left such an impression of stern, yet gentle, wildness on my memory as will not be soon effaced.... When next we awoke, the moon and the stars were shining again, and there were signs of dawn in the east.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all l...ife, all races and breeds into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive. At the feet of the tallest and plushest offices lie the crummiest slums. The genteel mysteries housed in the Riverside Church are only a few blocks from the voodoo charms of Harlem. The merchant princes, riding to Wall Street in their limousines down the East River Drive, pass within a few hundred yards of the gypsy kings; but the princes do not know they are passing the kings, and the kings are not up yet anyway--they live a more leisurely life than the princes and get drunk more consistently.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
On the beach at night, Stands a child with her father,... Watching the east, the autumn sky.
Up through the darkness, While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading, Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everything in the neighbourhood of this city exhibits the appearance of life and cheerfulness. The purity of the air, the brillian...cy of the unspotted heavens, the crowd of moving vessels, shooting in various directions, up and down and across the bay and the far- stretching Hudson, and the forest of masts crowded round the quays and wharfs at the entrance of the East River. There is something in all this--in the very air you breathe, and the fair and moving scene that you rest your eye upon--which exhilarates the spirits and makes you in good humour with life and your fellow creatures. We approached these shores under a fervid sun, but the air, though of a higher temperature than I had ever before experienced, was so entirely free of vapor, that I thought it was for the first time in my life that I had drawn a clear breath.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »