I've been aboard this destroyer for two weeks now, and we've already been through four air attacks. I'm in the war at last, Doc. I... caught up with that task force that passed me by. I'm glad to be here. I had to be here, I guess. But I'm thinking now of you, Doc, and you, Frank, and Dolan, and Dawdy, and Insignia, and everyone else on that bucket. All the guys everywhere who sailed from tedium to apathy and back again with an occasional sidetrip to monotony. This is a tough crew on here and they have a wonderful battle record. But I've discovered, Doc, that the unseen enemy of this war is the boredom that eventually becomes a faith and, therefore, a terrible sort of suicide. And I know now that the ones who refuse to surrender to it are the strongest of all. Right now, I'm looking at something that's hanging over my desk, a preposterous hunk of brass attached to the most bilious piece of ribbon I've ever seen. I'd rather have it than the Congressional Medal of Honor. It tells me what I'll always be proudest of, that at a time in the world when courage counted most, I lived among sixty-two brave men. So Doc, and especially you, Frank, don't let those guys down.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in hi...m.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Come, dear children, let us away; Down and away below!... Now my brothers call from the bay, Now the great winds shoreward blow, Now the salt tides seaward flow; Now the wild white horses play, Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To "Why am I here?" To uselessness. It's the streami...ng reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet. Making cont...act with this Wild Man is the step the Eighties male or the Nineties male has yet to take. That bucketing-out process has yet to begin in our contemporary culture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let Love step down, open the clasped hands,... forfeit the thorny crown, retrieve the garment that was whole, body and spirit one, spirit and soul.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simul...taneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built. Nor let us look down on the standpoint of the theory as make-believe; for we can never do better than occupy the standpoint of some theory or other, the best we can muster at the time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let us lie down once more by the breathing side Of Ocean, where our live forefathers sleep... As if the Known Sea still were a month wide-- Atlantis howls but is no longer steep!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »