Come, thou shalt go home, and we'll have flesh for holidays, fish for fasting-days, and moreo'er puddings and flap-jacks, and thou... shalt be welcome.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
According to fiction, the hillman is a seven-foot combination of malnutrition and hookworm, asleep on his front porch with the dog...s. His great bare feet, dangling off the porch, flap from time to time when the flies get too pesky, but nothing awakens him except a hound's salute to a stranger. Then he shoots up his astounding neck to its full length, ogles the visitor, and on his hunting horn blows a series of long and short blasts that means, "Hide yore stills and oil yore guns; they air a stranger h'yar."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
On the earth a many-colored tower of longing rises. There are many ads (to help pay for all this).... Something interesting is happening on every landing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fi...ght in the hills; we shall never surrender.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the same ...horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Life is a long Dardenelles, My Dear Madam, the shores whereof are bright with flowers, which we want to pluck, but the bank is too... high; & so we float on & on, hoping to come to a landing-place at last--but swoop! we launch into the great sea! Yet the geographers say, even then we must not despair, because across the great sea, however desolate & vacant it may look, lie all Persia & the delicious lands roundabout Damascus.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That is to say, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me ...of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits--like becoming a millionaire or a prime minister, winning a war, seducing b...eautiful women, flying thought the stratosphere or landing on the moon. First-rate pursuits--involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding--inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napoleon, a Churchill, a Roosevelt can feel themselves to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, a Blake. Understanding is for ever unattainable. Therein lies the inevitablility of failure in embarking upon its quest, which is none the less the only one worthy of serious attention.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »