I can't accept "our nervous age," since mankind has been nervous during every age. Whoever fears nervousness should turn into a st...urgeon or smelt; if a sturgeon makes a stupid mistake, it can only be one: to end up on a hook, and then in a pan in a pastry shell.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
From an old ruined fort on Staten Island, I have loved to watch all day some vessel whose name I had read in the morning through t...he telegraph glass, when she first came upon the coast, and her hull heaved up and glistened in the sun, from the moment when the pilot and most adventurous news-boats met her, past the Hook, and up the narrow channel of the wide bay, till she was boarded by the health officer, and took her station at quarantine, or held on her unquestioned course to the wharves of New York. It was interesting, too, to watch the less adventurous newsman, who made his assault as the vessel swept through the Narrows, defying plague and quarantine law, and, fastening his little cockboat to her huge side, clambered up and disappeared in the cabin. And then I could imagine what momentous news was being imparted by the captain, which no American ear had ever heard, that Asia, Africa, Europe--were all sunk; for which at length he pays the price, and is seen descending the ship's side with his bundle of newspapers,... to dispose of his wares to the highest bidder, and we shall ere long read something startling,--"By the latest arrival,"M"by the good ship--M."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
leaving the page of the book carelessly open, something unsaid, the phone off the hook... and the love, whatever it was, an infection.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A somonour was ther with us in that place That hadde a fyr-reed cherubynnes face,... For sawcefleem he was, with eyen narwe. As hoot he was and lecherous as a sparwe,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It could be clearly proved that by a practical nullification [by the South] of the Fifteenth Amendment the Republicans have for se...veral years been deprived of a majority in both the House and Senate. The failure of the South to faithfully observe the Fifteenth Amendment is the cause of the failure of all efforts towards complete pacification. It is on this hook that the bloody shirt now hangs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Give me mine angle, we'll to th' river; there, My music playing far off, I will betray... Tawny-finned fishes; my bended hook shall pierce Their slimy jaws; and as I draw them up, I'll think them every one an Antony, And say, "Ah, ha! y' are caught."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In quiet and untroubled times it seems to every administrator that it is only by his efforts that the whole population under his r...ule is kept going, and in this consciousness of being indispensable every administrator finds the chief reward of his labor and efforts. While the sea of history remains calm the ruler-administrator in his frail bark, holding on with a boat hook to the ship of the people and himself moving, naturally imagines that his efforts move the ship he is holding on to. But as soon as a storm arises and the sea begins to heave and the ship to move, such a delusion is no longer possible. The ship moves independently with its own enormous motion, the boat hook no longer reaches the moving vessel, and suddenly the administrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an insignificant, useless, feeble man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. In our hands it develops and changes, through more or less arbitrary and deliber...ate revisions and additions of our own, more or less directly occasioned by the continuing stimulation of our sense organs. It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »