I'll come up the steps to the house and the gardener will be clipping away at the hedges and he'll say, "Good evening, Mr. Younger...." And I'll say, "Hello, Jefferson, how are you this evening?" And I'll go inside and Ruth will come downstairs and meet me at the door and we'll kiss each other and she'll take my arm and we'll go up to your room to see you sitting on the floor with the catalogues of all the great schools in America around you.... All the great schools in the world! And--and I'll say, all right son--it's your seventeenth birthday, what is it you've decided?... Just tell me, what it is you want to be--and you'll be it.... Whatever you want to be--Yessir! You just name it, so ... and I hand you the world!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The receipt to make a speaker, and an applauded one too, is short and easy.--Take of common sense quantum sufficit, add a little a...pplication to the rules and orders of the House, throw obvious thoughts in a new light, and make up the whole with a large quantity of purity, correctness, and elegancy of style.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Renaissance was, as much as anything, a revolt from the logic of the Middle Ages. We speak of the Renaissance as the birth of ...rationalism; it was in many ways the birth of irrationalism. It is true that the medieval Schoolmen, who had produced the finest logic that the world has ever seen, had in later years produced more logic than the world can ever be expected to stand. They had loaded and lumbered up the world with libraries of mere logic; and some effort was bound to be made to free it from such endless chains of deduction. Therefore, there was in the Renaissance a wild touch of revolt, not against religion but against reason.... When all is said, there is something a little sinister in the number of mad people in Shakespeare. We say that he uses his fools to brighten the dark background of tragedy; I think he sometimes uses them to darken it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories t...o bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You will have to polish up the stars with Bab-o and find a new God... as the earth empties out into the gnarled hands of the old redeemer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I pity the men whose natural pleasures are burthens, and who fly from joy ... as if it was really an evil in itself.... Poor unfor...tunate creature that he is! as if the causes of anguish in the heart were not enow--but he must fill up the measure, with those of caprice; and not only walk in a vain shadow,--but disquiet himself in vain too.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The ferry here took us past the Indian island. As we left the shore, I observed a short, shabby, washerwoman-looking Indian,--they... commonly have the woebegone look of the girl that cried for spilt milk,--just from "up river," land on the Oldtown side near a grocery, and, drawing up his canoe, take out a bundle of skins in one hand, and an empty keg or half-barrel in the other, and scramble up the bank with them. This picture will do to put before the Indian's history, that is, the history of his extinction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Heaven nor hell shall impede my designs," said Manfred, advancing again to seize the princess. At that instant the portrait of hi...s grandfather ... uttered a deep sigh and heaved its breast. ... Manfred ... saw it quit its panel, and descend on the floor with a grave and melancholy air.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Of course, it may be that the arts of writing and photography are antithetical. The hope and aim of a word-handler is that he may ...communicate a thought or an impression to his reader without the reader's realizing that he has been dragged through a series of hazardous or grotesque syntactical situations. In photography the goal seems to be to prove beyond a doubt that the cameraman, in his great moment of creation, was either hanging by his heels from the rafters or was wedged under the floor with his lens in a knothole.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »