Every new stroke of civilization has cost the lives of countless brave men, who have fallen defeated by the "dragon," in their eff...orts to win the apples of the Hesperides, or the fleece of gold. Fallen in their efforts to overcome the old, half sordid savagery of the lower stages of creation, and win the next stage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful. The Greeks engendered the chimera, a ...monster with heads of the lion, the dragon and the goat; the theologians of the second century, the Trinity, in which the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are inextricably tied; the Chinese zoologists, the ti-yiang, a vermilion supernatural bird, endowed with six feet and four wings, but without a face or eyes; the geometers of the nineteenth century, the hypercube, a figure with four dimensions, which encloses an infinite number of cubes and has as its faces eight cubes and twenty-four squares. Hollywood has just enriched this vain museum of horrors: by means of an artistic malignity called dubbing, it proposes monsters that combine the illustrious features of Greta Garbo with the voice of Aldonza Lorenzo.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What was he doing, the great god Pan, Down in the reeds by the river?... Spreading ruin and scattering ban, Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat, And breaking the golden lilies afloat With the dragon-fly on the river.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retail, in gas jars; then may we ho...pe to comprehend the infinitudes of man's soul under formulas of Profit and Loss; and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks, and valves, and balances.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The cities drain the country of the best part of its population: the flower of the youth, of both sexes, goes into the towns, and ...the country is cultivated by a so much inferior class. The land,--travel a whole day together,--looks poverty-stricken, and the buildings plain and poor.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Animals used to provide a lowlife way to kill and get away with it, as they do still, but, more intriguingly, for some people they... are an aperture through which wounds drain. The scapegoat of olden times, driven off for the bystanders' sins, has become a tender thing, a running injury. There, running away ... is me: hurt it and you are hurting me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes. Petals are bone marrow; pearls com...e from oysters. The dragon lives in the sky, ocean, marshes, and mountains; and the mountains are also its cranium. Its voice thunders and jingles like copper pans. It breathes fire and water; and sometimes the dragon is one, sometimes many.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide! How couldst thou drain the lifeblood of the child,... To bid the father wipe his eyes withal, And yet be seen to bear a woman's face? Women are soft, mild, pitiful, and flexible; Thou stern, obdurate, flinty, rough, remorseless.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »