Thus is Paradise to be Regained, and that old and stern decree at length reversed. Man shall no more earn his living by the sweat ...of his brow. All labor shall be reduced to "a short turn of some crank," and "taking the finished articles away." But there is a crank,--oh, how hard to be turned! Could there not be a crank upon a crank,--an infinitely small crank? Mwe would fain inquire. No,--alas! not.... In fact, no work can be shirked. It may be postponed indefinitely, but not infinitely. Nor can any really important work be made easier by coöperation or machinery. Not one particle of labor now threatening any man can be routed without being performed. It cannot be hunted out of the vicinity like jackals and hyenas. It will not run. You may begin by sawing the little sticks, or you may saw the great sticks first, but sooner or later you must saw them both.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Are not the days of my life few? Let me alone, that I may find a little comfort before I go, never to return, to the land of gloom... and deep darkness, the land of gloom and chaos, where light is like darkness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Darling, will you come home today... after a few hours, or at noon, or a little later, or when the whole day's passed?" A young wife with tearful words stuck in her throat spoils the departure of her man who wishes to go to a land that takes a hundred days to reach.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A country is strong which consists of wealthy families, every member of whom is interested in defending a common treasure; it is w...eak when composed of scattered individuals, to whom it matters little whether they obey seven or one, a Russian or a Corsican, so long as each keeps his own plot of land, blind in their wretched egotism, to the fact that the day is coming when this too will be torn from them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it--for a little ...while.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre ...wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy's mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, t...he moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose colour, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world. In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The years seemed to stretch before her like the land: spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring; always the same patient fields, the ...patient little trees, the patient lives; always the same yearning; the same pulling at the chain--until the instinct to live had torn itself and bled and weakened for the last time, until the chain secured a dead woman, who might cautiously be released.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O beautiful white land, olives and wild anemone and violet... mingled among the shale, and purple wings of little winter-butterflies say, here Psyche, the soul, lies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »