New Yorkers speak more quickly and shift topics more rapidly. We all know that. But the way it's done is fascinating. At least it ...fascinated me when I first moved to New York. Someone has the floor and talks. As soon as I know what they are going to say, I can jump in, finish the sentence to show I understand, and take off into my own turn. The northern California I know isn't like that. Someone talks, and I lie back and listen and let them roll for a while. When they're done, there'll be a pause that will flash like a green light to announce that someone else can have the floor.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... looped with the creep of varying light, Monkey-brown, fish-grey, a string of infected circles... Loitering like bullies, about to coagulate....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We not only grew up on Be-Bop; Be-Bop raised us. For my generation, Be-Bop came on like a light bulb going flash behind the eyes. ...For us, it was not only an intellectual movement, but a way of life. We walked, dressed, and rapped Be-Bop.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Little fish swam by his nose and he noted them and touched their slime.... Plankton came and he held them in his palm like God's littlest light bulbs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild... thinking in Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the scriptures and mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us. As the wild duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild--mallard--thought, which 'mid falling dews wings its way above the fens. A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself,--and not a taper lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When they have a choice, people will always gravitate to those rooms which have light on two sides, and leave the rooms which are ...lit only from one side unused and empty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.... He who works for sweetness and light united, works to m...ake reason and the will of God prevail.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Now bury your bird," the wind it bawled, "And bury him down and down... Who had to put his trust in one So light-eyed and so brown...."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »