What one really wants is youth, and what one really loses is years. Life becomes at last a mere piece of acting. One goes on by ha...bit, playing more or less clumsily that one is still alive. It is ludicrous and at times humiliating, but there is a certain style in it which youth has not. We become all, more or less, gentlemen; we are ancien régime; we learn to smile while gout racks us.... We get out of bed in the morning all broken up, without nerves, color or temper, and by noon we are joking with young women about the play. One lives in constant company with diseased hearts, livers, kidneys and lungs; one shakes hands with certain death at closer embrace every day; one sees paralysis in every feature and feels it in every muscle; all one's functions relax their action day by day; and, what is worse, one's grasp on the interests of life relaxes with the physical relaxation; and, through it all, we improve; our manners acquire refinement; our sympathies grow wider; our youthful self-consciousness disappears; very ordinary men and women are found to have charm; our appreciations have weight; we should almost get to respect ourselves if we knew of anything human to respect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the ...walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. I wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way. I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"... I have to take What I can get. You see they have the feet,... Which gives them the advantage in the trade. I can't get back the feet in any case."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is nothing of permanent value (putting aside a few human affections) nothing that satisfies quiet reflection--except the sen...se of having worked according to one's capacity and light to make things clear and get rid of cant and shams of all sorts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Boys forget what their country means by just reading "the land of the free" in history books. Then they get to be men, they forget... even more. Liberty's too precious a thing to be buried in books.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men always sell strawberries, women, blackberries, your all- knowing Creole friend says. 'Why?' you ask. 'Ah, it has always been t...hat way.' When you get to know Creoles better, you realize that the phrase 'It has always been that way' justifies everything.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Neither a work of nature nor one of art we get to know when they have been finished; we must surprise them in the process of being... created so as to understand them to some degree.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »