To abolish a status, which in all ages God has sanctioned, and man has continued, would not only be robbery to an innumerable clas...s of our fellow-subjects; but it would be extreme cruelty to the African Savages, a portion of whom it saves from massacre, or intolerable bondage in their own country, and introduces into a much happier state of life; especially now when their passage to the West-Indies and their treatment there is humanely regulated.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passag...e. As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Must we to bed indeed? Well then, Let us arise and go like men,... And face with an undaunted tread The long black passage up to bed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So I was glad of the fog's Taking me to you... Undetermined summer thing eaten Of grief and passage where you stay. The wheel is ready to turn again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The exercise of letters is sometimes linked to the ambition to contruct an absolute book, a book of books that includes the others... like a Platonic archetype, an object whose virtues are not diminished by the passage of time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Homer sweeps us away by the irresistible movement of lines through a whole passage to a splendid climax. What counts is the single...ness of his effect, the unbroken maintenance of a heroic or tragic mood, the concentration on some action vividly imagined and clearly portrayed without irrelevance or second thoughts or even those hints that lure into bypaths of fancy and suggest that there is more in the words than is obvious at first sight. But in Virgil, great though the paragraphs are, compelling though the climax is when it is reached, we are more concerned with the details, with each small effect and each deftly placed word, than with the whole. We linger over the richness of single phrases, over the "pathetic half-lines," over the precision or potency with which a word illuminates a sentence or a happy sequence of sounds imparts an inexplicable charm to something that might otherwise have been trivial. Of course, Homer has his magical phrases and Virgil his bold effects, but the distinction stands. It is a matter of composition, of art, and it marks the real difference between the two kinds of epic, which are not so much "authentic" and "literary" as oral and written.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat hole: she knelt down and looked along... the passage into the lovliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head through the doorway.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If the oarsmen of a fast-moving ship suddenly cease to row, the suspension of the driving force of the oars doesn't prevent the ve...ssel from continuing to move on its course. And with a speech it is much the same. After he has finished reciting the document, the speaker will still be able to maintain the same tone without a break, borrowing its momentum and impulse from the passage he has just read out.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O harmless Death! whom still the valiant brave, The wise expect, the sorrowful invite,... And all the good embrace, who know the grave A short dark passage to eternal light.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »