Fences, unlike punishments, clearly mark out the perimeters of any specified territory. Young children learn where it is permissib...le to play, because their backyard fence plainly outlines the safe area. They learn about the invisible fence that surrounds the stove, and that Grandma has an invisible barrier around her cabinet of antique teacups.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefac...tor of our race. He brought death into the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And songs climb out of the flames of the near campfires, Pale, pastel things exquisite in their frailness... With a note or two to indicate it isn't lost, On them at least. The songs decorate our notion of the world And mark its limits, like a frieze of soap-bubbles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I ...had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman's career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Father Latour judged that, just as it was the white man's way to assert himself in any landscape, to change it, make it over a lit...tle (at least to leave some mark of memorial of his sojourn), it was the Indian's way to pass through a country without disturbing anything; to pass and leave no trace, like fish through the water, or birds through the air. It was the Indian manner to vanish into the landscape, not to stand out against it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For a symbol is like a rock dropped into a pool: it sends out ripples in all directions, and the ripples are in motion. Who can sa...y where the last ripple disappears? One may have a sense that he at least knows approximately the center point of all those ripples, the point at which the stone struck the water. Yet even then he has trouble marking it precisely. How does one make a mark on water? ... The ripples continue to move and the light to change on the water and the longer one watches the more changes he sees. And such shifting-and-being-at-the-same-instant is of the very sparkle and life of poetry. Of poetry and of life itself. For the poem is a dynamic and living thing. One experiences it as one experiences life--as everybody but Mr. Gradgrind experiences life. One is never done with it: every time he looks he sees something new, and it changes even as he watches. And that very sense of continuity in fluidity is one of the kinds of knowledge, one of the ways of knowing, that only the arts can teach, poetry foremost among them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They will mark the stone-battlements And the circle of them... With a bright stain. They will cast out the dead A sight for Priam's queen to lament And her frightened daughters.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mark Twain didn't psychoanalyze Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer. Dickens didn't put Oliver Twist on the couch because he was hungry! Good ...copy comes out of people, Johnny, not out of a lot of explanatory medical terms.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Out of the thousand writers huffing and puffing through movieland there are scarcely fifty men and women of wit or talent. The res...t of the fraternity is deadwood. Yet, in a curious way, there is not much difference between the product of a good writer and a bad one. They both have to toe the same mark.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »