When we think back to our forefathers, with their sedentary lives of forest-chopping, railroad-building, fortune-founding, their f...ox-hunting and Indian taming, their prancing about in the mazurka and the polka, with their coattails flying and their bustles bouncing, to say nothing of their all-day sessions with the port and straight bourbon,... we must realize that we are a nation, not of neurasthenics, but of sissies and slow-motion sports.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows o...ne big thing." Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog's one defence. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance--and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory.... Their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classifica tion, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The fox, he felt, had never seen his past disposed of like a fall of water. He had never measured off his day in moments: another-...-another--another. But now, thrown down so deeply in himself, into the darkness of the well, surprised by pain and hunger, might he not revert to an earlier condition, regain capacities which formerly were useless to him, pass from animal to Henry, become human in his prison, X his days, count, wait, listen for another--another--another--another?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The butterfly, a cabbage-white, (His honest idiocy of flight)... Will never now, it is too late, Master the art of flying straight,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Man with lantern: Who are you? Captain: The Flying Cloud. 220 days out of New York and 50 days trying to find your blasted ha...rbor. Man with lantern: Nobody asked you to come. Captain: Got anything in this hog-end of the world except fog? Man with lantern: Sure, we've got gold, fountains of gold.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Coming about its own business Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox... It enters the dark hole of the head. The window is starless still; the clock ticks, The page is printed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A real fox calls sour not only those grapes that he cannot reach but also those that he has reached and taken away from others.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We follow where the Swamp Fox guides, His friends and merry men are we;... And when the troop of Tarleton rides, We burrow in the cypress tree. The turfy hammock is our bed, Our home is in the red deer's den, Our roof, the tree-top overhead, For we are wild and hunted men.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An aspiring genius was D. Green: The son of a farmer, age fourteen;... His body was long and lank and lean-- Just right for flying, as will be seen;LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Dizzy: Say, don't you think about anything but flying? When did the bug first bite you? Tommy: You remember the day Lindy cam...e back from Paris?... I was only a kid, but I'll never forget it. They wrote "Welcome Home" with smoke across the sky and signed it QB.... I didn't even know what QB meant. Then someone told me about the quiet burglar. Old pilots joining together to help the flying game. I loved that. They seemed apart from ordinary people. Dizzy: Oh they were. That, that first QB hanger was a great place. Each pilot had his own drinking mug, and whenever one got bumped off, they put the mug on the shelf over the bar, bottom up, and your first drink was always a silent toast to the shelf.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »