Life, in my estimation, is a biological misadventure that we terminate on the shoulders of six strange men whose only objective is... to make a hole in one with you.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This "charity-house," as the wrecker called it, this "Humane house," as some call it, that is, the one to which we first came, had... neither window nor sliding shutter, nor clapboards, nor paint. As we have said, there was a rusty nail put through the staple. However, as we wished to get an idea of a Humane house, and we hoped that we should never have a better opportunity, we put our eyes, by turns, to a knot-hole in the door, and, after long looking, without seeing, into the dark,--not knowing how many shipwrecked men's bones we might see at last, looking with the eye of faith, knowing that, though to him that knocketh it may not always be opened, yet to him that looketh long enough through a knot-hole the inside shall be visible,--for we had had some practice at looking inward,--by steadily keeping our other ball covered from the light meanwhile, putting the outward world behind us, ocean and land, and the beach,--till the pupil became enlarged and collected the rays of light that were wandering in that dark (for the pupil shall be enlarged by looking; there was never so dark a night but a faithful and patient eye, however small, might at last prevail over it),--after all this, I say, things began to take shape to our vision,--if we may use this expression where there was nothing but emptiness,--and we obtained the long-wished-for insight. Though we thought at first that it was a hopeless case, after several minutes' steady exercise of the divine faculty, our prospects began steadily to brighten, and we were ready to exclaim with the blind bard of "Paradise Lost and Regained,"-- "Hail, holy Light! offspring of Heaven first-born, Or of the Eternal coeternal beam May I express thee unblamed?" A little longer, and a chimney rushed red on our sight. In short, when our vision had grown familiar with the darkness, we discovered that there were some stones and some loose wads of wool on the floor, and an empty fireplace at the further end; but it was not supplied with matches, or straw, or hay, that we could see, nor "accommodated with a bench." Indeed, it was the wreck of all cosmical beauty there within. Turning our backs on the outward world, we thus looked through the knot-hole into the Humane house, into the very bowels of mercy; and for bread we found a stone. It was literally a great cry (of sea-mews outside), and a little wool. However, we were glad to sit outside, under the lee of the Humane house, to escape the piercing wind; and there we thought how cold is charity! how inhumane humanity! This, then, is what charity hides! Virtues antique and far away, with ever a rusty nail over the latch; and very difficult to keep in repair, withal, it is so uncertain whether any will ever gain the beach near you. So we shivered round about, not being able to get into it, ever and anon looking through the knot-hole into that night without a star, until we concluded that it was not a humane house at all, but a seaside box, now shut up, belonging to some of the family of Night or Chaos, where they spent their summers by the sea, for the sake of the sea-breeze, and that it was not proper for us to be prying into their concerns.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And the truth becomes a hole, something one has always known, A heaviness in the trees, and no one can say... Where it comes from, or how long it will stay A randomness, a darkness of one's own.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is great fear expressed on all sides lest this war shall be made a war for the negro. I am willing that it shall be. It is a... war to found an empire on the negro in slavery, and shame on us if we do not make it a war to establish the negro in freedom--against whom the whole nation, North and South, East and West, in one mighty conspiracy, has combined from the beginning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I feel the carousel starting slowly And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books,... Photographs of friends, the window and the trees Merging in one neutral band that surrounds Me on all sides, everywhere I look.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinaesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, cons...umer goods, status--all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, w...ho would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history." History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A poet is a combination of an instrument and a human being in one person, with the former gradually taking over the latter. The se...nsation of this takeover is responsible for timbre; the realization of it, for destiny.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We delight in one knowable thing, which comprehends all that is knowable; in one apprehensible, which draws together all that can ...be apprehended; in a single being that includes all, above all in the one which is itself the all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People believe a man is in distress because his loved one dies in one day. But his real pain is less futile: it is that he finds o...ut that sadness too does not last. Even pain has no meaning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »