I ask myself: what are my views on death, the next world, God? I look into my mind and discover I am too much of a mannikin to hav...e any. As for death, I am a little bit of trembling jelly of anticipation. I am prepared for anything, but I am the complete agnostic; I simply don't know. To have views, faith, beliefs, one needs a backbone. This great bully of a universe overwhelms me. The stars make me cower. I am intimidated by the immensity surrounding my own littleness. It is futile and presumptuous for me to opine anything about the next world. But I hope for something much freer and more satisfying after death, for emancipation of the spirit and above all for the obliteration of this puny self, this little, skulking, sharp-witted ferret.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 »
When her guests were awash with champagne and with gin, She was recklessly sober, as sharp as a pin.... An abstemious man would reel at her look, As she rolled a bright eye and praised his last book.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I would have broke mine eye-strings, cracked them, but To look upon him, till the diminution... Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle; Nay, followed him till he had melted from The smallness of a gnat to air, and then Have turned mine eye and wept.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The solid and well-defined fir-tops, like sharp and regular spearheads, black against the sky, gave a peculiar, dark, and sombre l...ook to the forest.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 »
It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world ...to the other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To beguile the time, Look like the time, bear welcome in your eye,... Your hand, your tongue; look like the innocent flower, But be the serpent under't.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »