Come, thou shalt go home, and we'll have flesh for holidays, fish for fasting-days, and moreo'er puddings and flap-jacks, and thou... shalt be welcome.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
According to fiction, the hillman is a seven-foot combination of malnutrition and hookworm, asleep on his front porch with the dog...s. His great bare feet, dangling off the porch, flap from time to time when the flies get too pesky, but nothing awakens him except a hound's salute to a stranger. Then he shoots up his astounding neck to its full length, ogles the visitor, and on his hunting horn blows a series of long and short blasts that means, "Hide yore stills and oil yore guns; they air a stranger h'yar."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And this, because the heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature,... but one blood rolls uninterruptedly an endless circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is ... useful to distinguish between the pornographic, condemned in every society, and the bawdy, the ribald, the shared vulgar...ities and jokes, which are the safety valves of most social systems. Pornography is a most doubtful safety valve. In extreme cases it may feed the perverted imagination of the doomed man who starts by pulling a little girl's braid and ends by cutting off a little girl's head, as each increasing stimulus loses its effectiveness and must be replaced by a more extreme one. This is particularly true of the pornography primarily designed to be brooded over in secret. But is quite otherwise with the music hall jokes, the folk ribaldry at a wedding, the innocent smut of the smoking rooms, where men who are perennially faithful to their wives exchange stories which release explosive laughter. Pornography does not lead to laughter, it leads to deadly serious pursuit of sexual satisfaction divorced from personality and from every other meaning. The uproarious laugh of the group who recognize a common dilemma--the laughter of a group of women at the story of the intractable unborn who refused to budge and merely shivered under the effects of the quart of ice cream hopefully eaten by its poor mother, the laughter of a group of men at the story of the bride who asked to be "frightened" a fourth time--is the laughter of human beings who are making the best of the imperfect social arrangements within which their life here on earth is conducted.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That is to say, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me ...of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let Sporus tremble--'What? That thing of silk, Sporus, that mere white curd of ass's milk?... Satire or sense, alas, can Sporus feel, Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?' Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings, This painted child of dirt, that stinks and stings; Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys, Yet wit ne'er tastes, and beauty ne'er enjoys:LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The normal family triangle, then, provides the daughter with a stage upon which to rehearse her separate identity. When the parent...s' marriage is relatively free of conflict, the daughter can go from one parent to the other for an emotional safety valve, to let off steam. Having equal, unambivalent access to both parents--and spared their competition for her loyalty--she can then concentrate not so much on dual allegiance as on simply growing up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high, is sometimes overlaid with a mass of this kind of foliage, or sandy ruptu...re, for a quarter of a mile on one or both sides, the produce of one spring day. What makes this sand foliage remarkable is its springing into existence thus suddenly. When I see on the one side the inert bank,--for the sun acts on one side first,--and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the creation of an hour, I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me,--had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about. I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body. You find thus in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. Internally, whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat (leibo, labor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing; lobos, globus, lobe, globe; also lap, flap, and many other words); externally, a dry thin leaf, even as the f and v are a pressed and dried b. The radicals of lobe are lb, the soft mass of the b (single-lobed, or B, double-lobed), with the liquid l behind it pressing it forward. In globe, glb, the gutteral g adds to the meaning the capacity of the throat. The feather and wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is easy to see that, even in the freedom of early youth, an American girl never quite loses control of herself; she enjoys all ...permitted pleasures without losing her head about any of them, and her reason never lets the reins go, though it may often seem to let them flap.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »