The foreigner coming to these shores is more impressed at first by our sky-scrapers. They are new to him. He has not done anything... of the sort since he built the tower of Babel. The foreigner is shocked by them. In the daylight they are ugly. They are--well, too chimneyfied and too snaggy--like a mouth that needs attention from a dentist; like a cemetery that is all monuments and no gravestones. But at night, seen from the river where they are columns towering against the sky, all sparkling with light, they are fairylike; they are beauty more satisfactory to the soul than anything man has dreamed of since the Arabian nightsLESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We over-estimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less.... Everything that is his,--his name, his form, his dress, books, and instruments,--fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As long as the "woman's work" that some men do is socially devalued, as long as it is defined as woman's work, as long as it's tac...ked onto a "regular" work day, men who share it are likely to develop the same jagged mouth and frazzled hair as the coffee-mug mom. The image of the new man is like the image of the supermom: it obscures the strain.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Even against all hazards I had ... hit the bull's-eye. My head swelled two sizes larger, and my mouth developed a brand-new snarl.... Take a look at me now, you guys that think I don't know what I'm doing, and see if I care! and work.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are born with luck which is to say with gold in our mouth.... As new and smooth as a grape, as pure as a pond in Alaska, as good as the stem of a green bean we are born and that ought to be enough....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Of course the New Testament is very small.... Its mouth opens four times as out-of-date as a prehistoric monster, yet somehow man-made....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have forgiven all the old actors for dying. A new one comes on with the same lines,... like large white growths, in his mouth. The dancers come on from the wings, perfectly mated.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thus a man shall lead his life away here on the edge of the wilderness, on Indian Millinocket Stream, in a new world, far in the d...ark of a continent, and have a flute to play at evening here, while his strains echo to the stars, amid the howling of wolves; shall live, as it were, in the primitive age of the world, a primitive man. Yet he shall spend a sunny day, and in this century be my contemporary; perchance shall read some scattered leaves of literature, and sometimes talk with me. Why read history, then, if the ages and the generations are now? He lives three thousand years deep into time, an age not yet described by poets. Can you well go further back in history than this? Ay! ay!--for there turns up but now into the mouth of Millinocket Stream a still more ancient and primitive man, whose history is not brought down even to the former. In a bark vessel sewn with the roots of the spruce, with hornbeam paddles, he dips his way along. He is but dim and misty to me, obscured by the æons that lie between the bark canoe and the batteau. He builds no house of logs, but a wigwam of skins. He eats no hot bread and sweet cake, but musquash and moose meat and the fat of bears. He glides up the Millinocket and is lost to my sight, as a more distant and misty cloud is seen flitting by behind a nearer, and is lost in space. So he goes about his destiny, the red face of man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well.... In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat-Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the names.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »