Both Look Homeward, Angel and Tristram Shandy defy formal analysis. Both are concerned with the education of the very young. Both ...see that education as essentially the product of the impact of the world outside upon the young mind. Both describe that education through memories in maturity.... Both books are family novels, particularly rich in brilliantly rich, hyperbolically presented family portraits.... Both men were remarkably proficient at capturing the individual cadences of human speech and reproducing them with sharp accuracy, and both delighted in the rhetorically extravagant; so that their works present, not a unified style, but a medley of styles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding seas Wash far away, where e'er thy bones are hurl'd,... Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides, Where thou perhaps under the humming tide Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world, Or whether thou, to our moist vows deni'd, Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old, Where the great vision of the guarded Mount Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold. Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth, And O ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new... ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the ...rollercoaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Rich she shall be, that's certain; wise, or I'll none; virtuous, or I'll never cheapen her; fair, or I'll never look on her; mild,... or come not near me; noble, or not I for an angel; of good discourse, an excellent musician, and her hair shall be of what color it please God.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
With a bending sail we glided rapidly by Tyngsborough and Chelmsford, each holding in one hand half of a tart country apple pie wh...ich we had purchased to celebrate our return, and in the other a fragment of the newspaper in which it was wrapped, devouring these with divided relish, and learning the news which had transpired since we sailed. The river here opened into a broad and straight reach of great length, which we bounded merrily over before a smacking breeze, with a devil-may-care look in our faces, and our boat a white bone in its mouth, and a speed which greatly astonished some scow boatmen whom we met. The wind in the horizon rolled like a flood over valley and plain, and every tree bent to the blast, and the mountains like school-boys turned their cheeks to it.... Thus we sailed, not being able to fly, but as next best, making a long furrow in the fields of the Merrimack toward our home, with our wings spread, but never lifting our heel from the watery trench; gracefully plowing homeward with our brisk and willing team, wind and stream, pulling together, the former yet a wild steer, yoked to his more sedate fellow. It was very near flying, as when the duck rushes through the water with an impulse of her wings, throwing the spray about her before she can rise. How we had stuck fast if drawn up but a few feet on the shore!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowhere ...in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal's gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Angel that presided o'er my birth Said, "Little creature, formed of Joy and Mirth,... Go love without the help of any thing on earth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »