The mortal enemies of man are not his fellows of another continent or race; they are the aspects of the physical world which limit... or challenge his control, the disease germs that attack him and his domesticated plants and animals, and the insects that carry many of these germs as well as working notable direct injury. This is not ... the age of man, however great his superiority in size and intelligence; it is literally the age of insects.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[I]t is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an ...expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We term sleep a death ... by which we may be literally said to die daily; in fine, so like death, I dare not trust it without my p...rayers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My general theory since 1971 has been that the word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognised as such because it h...as achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the word virus (the Other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's like a jumble of huts in a jungle somewhere. I don't understand how you can live there. It's really, completely dead. Walk al...ong the street, there's nothing moving. I've lived in small Spanish fishing villages which were literally sunny all day long everyday of the week, but they weren't as boring as Los Angeles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean- tide, o...n which we and all the universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb, for we have no word to speak about it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work fifteen and sixteen hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from ...the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The true critic is a scrupulous avoider of formulae; he refrains from statements which pretend to be literally true; he finds fact... nowhere and approximation always.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »