Conversation is a game of circles. In conversation we pluck up the termini which bound the common silence on every side. The parti...es are not to be judged by the spirit they partake and even express under this Pentecost. To-morrow they will have receded from this high-water mark. To-morrow you shall find them stooping under the old pack-saddles. Yet let us enjoy the cloven flame whilst it glows on these walls. When each new speaker strikes a new light, emancipates us from the oppression of the last speaker to oppress us with the greatness and exclusiveness of his own thought, then yields us to another redeemer, we seem to recover our rights, to become men.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Before the land rose out of the ocean, and became dry land, chaos reigned; and between high and low water mark, where she is parti...ally disrobed and rising, a sort of chaos reigns still, which only anomalous creatures can inhabit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Father Latour judged that, just as it was the white man's way to assert himself in any landscape, to change it, make it over a lit...tle (at least to leave some mark of memorial of his sojourn), it was the Indian's way to pass through a country without disturbing anything; to pass and leave no trace, like fish through the water, or birds through the air. It was the Indian manner to vanish into the landscape, not to stand out against it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, yo...u were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For a symbol is like a rock dropped into a pool: it sends out ripples in all directions, and the ripples are in motion. Who can sa...y where the last ripple disappears? One may have a sense that he at least knows approximately the center point of all those ripples, the point at which the stone struck the water. Yet even then he has trouble marking it precisely. How does one make a mark on water? ... The ripples continue to move and the light to change on the water and the longer one watches the more changes he sees. And such shifting-and-being-at-the-same-instant is of the very sparkle and life of poetry. Of poetry and of life itself. For the poem is a dynamic and living thing. One experiences it as one experiences life--as everybody but Mr. Gradgrind experiences life. One is never done with it: every time he looks he sees something new, and it changes even as he watches. And that very sense of continuity in fluidity is one of the kinds of knowledge, one of the ways of knowing, that only the arts can teach, poetry foremost among them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But hospitality must be for service, and not for show, or it pulls down the host. The brave soul rates itself too high to value it...self by the splendor of its table and draperies. It gives what it hath, and all it hath, but its own majesty can lend a better grace to bannocks and fair water than belong to city feasts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Do not fear to put thy feet Naked in the river sweet;... Think not leech, or newt, or toad Will bite thy foot when thou hast trod; Nor let the water, rising high, As thou wadest, make thee cry, And sob; but ever live with me, And not a wave shall trouble thee.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,... dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And in spite of everything, Ireland remains the brain of the Kingdom. The English, judiciously practical and ponderous, furnish th...e over-stuffed stomach of humanity with a perfect gadget--the water closet. The Irish, condemned to express themselves in a language not their own, have stamped on it the mark of their own genius and compete for glory with the civilized nations. This is then called English literature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »