Mrs. Van Hopper: Most girls would give their eyes for a chance to see Monte. Maxim de Winter: Wouldn't that rather defeat the... purpose?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are afloat On our dreams as on a barge made of ice,... Shot through with questions and fissures of starlight That keep us awake, thinking about the dreams As they are happening. Some occurrence. You said it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The real questions are the ones that obtrude upon your consciousness whether you like it or not, the ones that make your mind star...t vibrating like a jackhammer, the ones that you "come to terms with" only to discover that they are still there. The real questions refuse to be placated. They barge into your life at the times when it seems most important for them to stay away. They are the questions asked most frequently and answered most inadequately, the ones that reveal their true natures slowly, reluctantly, most often against your will.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... one of those fortunate men who, if they were to dive under one side of a barge stark-naked, would come up on the other with a ...new suit of clothes on, and a ticket for soup in the waistcoat-pocket.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The nearest analogy to Dreiser's "personal realism" is to be found in the painter Edward Hopper, who shares Dreiser's passion for ...transcendent writers, for images of trains and roads. Despite his similar choice of "ordinary" subjects, Hopper has written that his aim "has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature." ... One feels in the awkwardness, the dreaming stillness of Hopper's figures, the same struggle to express the ultimate confrontation of men and things that one does in Dreiser's reverent descriptions of saloons, street-cars, trains, hotels, offices.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The school system, custodian of print culture, has no place for the rugged individual. It is, indeed, the homogenizing hopper into... which we toss our integral tots for processing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne Burned on the water. The poop was beaten gold;... Purple the sails, and so perfumed that The winds were love-sick with them. The oars were silver, Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made The water which they beat to follow faster, As amorous of their strokes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Maxim de Winter: Tell me, is Mrs. Van Hopper a friend of yours or just a relation? Mrs. de Winter: No, she's my employer. I'm... what's known as a paid companion. Maxim de Winter: I didn't know that companionship could be bought.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You may rely on it that you have the best of me in my books, and that I am not worth seeing personally, the stuttering, blundering... clod-hopper that I am. Even poetry, you know, is in one sense an infinite brag and exaggeration. Not that I do not stand on all that I have written,--but what am I to the truth I feebly utter?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thou stately stream that with the swelling tide 'Gainst London walls incessantly dost beat,... Thou Thames, I say, where barge and boat doth ride, And snow-white swans do fish for needful meat:LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »