The true novel wrestles on the edge of understanding, lying about on all sides desperately, for every sort of experience, pressing... into use every flash of intuition or correspondence, trying to fuse together the crudest of materials, and the humblest, which the higher arts can't include. But it is precisely here, where the writer fights with the raw, the intractable, that poetry is born. Poetry, that is, of the novel: appropriate to it. The Story of an African Farm is a poetic novel; and when one has done with the "plot" and the characters, that is what remains: an endeavor, a kind of hunger, that passionate desire for growth and understanding, which is the deepest pulse of human beings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...it's dynamite to spend future earnings. I have had a taste of it myself, and it's mighty bitter. A debt is a debt, whether it's... margins or mortgages; and debts are all the same, no matter how you try to camouflage 'em. You never get much out of 'em except trouble. On the farm or in Wall Street, if you use the other fellow's money, it costs you a lot more than it's worth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
On the farm I had learned how to meet realities without suffering either mentally or physically. My initiative had never been blun...ted. I had freedom to succeed--freedom to fail. Life on the farm produces a kind of toughness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is not any present moment that is unconnected with some future one. The life of every man is a continued chain of incidents,... each link of which hangs upon the former. The transition from cause to effect, from event to event, is often carried on by secret steps, which our foresight cannot divine, and our sagacity is unable to trace. Evil may at some future period bring forth good; and good may bring forth evil, both equally unexpected.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
St. Joseph in 1859 had the bustling appearance of a great fair, with excited travelers preparing to make the plains journey in pra...irie schooners, "rickety old farm wagons," and even small two-wheeled push carts. many bore such mottoes as--"Faint Heart Never Won Fair Lady," "I Dare," "For Pike's Peak Ho." Before long many were to return, disappointed in their search for gold, hungry, ragged, and dispirited, their brave wagon boasts changed to "Prodigal Son," "Pike's Hell," "A Fool Is Born."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What makes the computer's representation special is that it can be manipulated so rapidly without direct human intervention. Once ...the program is determined and the machine set to work, the electrons fly until an answer is produced. An abacus can produce an answer mechanically by means of a person who unthinkingly slides the counters according to the rules. And yet the very fact that a human being is needed to push the counters suggests a close link between man and machine. The abacus is a tool rather than a machine, for it extends human technical capabilities while remaining intimately under human control. A machine runs more or less under its own control, with its own sense of purpose and its own inanimate source of power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whatever else may divide us, Europe is our common home; a common fate has linked us through the centuries, and it continues to lin...k us today.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Merrily swinging on brier and weed, Near to the nest of his litle dame,... Over the mountainside or mead, Robert of Lincoln is telling his name: Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were...) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fa...shions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »