McCoy: That shark's been following us ever since the surgeon died, waiting for the burial. Couldn't I have a musket to shoot it, s...ir? Fletcher Christian: Take the deck, McCoy. I'll get the keys to the arms chest. McCoy: Get two muskets, sir. I'd like to shoot that shark on board.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Though most of us don't hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, y...ou have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes. Animals that hear high frequencies better than we do--bats and dolphins, for instance--seem to see richly with their ears, hearing geographically, but for us the world becomes most densely informative, most luscious, when we take it in through our eyes. It may even be that abstract thinking evolved from our eyes' elaborate struggle to make sense of what they saw. Seventy percent of the body's sense receptors cluster in the eyes, and it is mainly through seeing the world that we appraise and understand it. Lovers close their eyes when they kiss because, if they didn't, there would be too many visual distractions to notice and analyze.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Miss Dudley ... gives one the idea of a lightly-sparred yacht in mid- ocean; unexpected; you ask yourself what the devil she is d...oing there. She sails gaily along, though there is no land in sight and plenty of rough weather coming. She never read a book, I believe, in her life. She tries to paint, but she is only a second-rate amateur and will never be any thing more, though she has done one or two things which I give you my word I would like to have done myself. She picks up all she knows without an effort and knows nothing well, yet she seems to understand whatever is said. Her mind is as irregular as her face, and both have the same peculiarity. I notice that the lines of her eyebrows, nose and mouth all end with a slight upward curve like a yacht's sails, which gives a kind of hopefulness and self-confidence to her expression. Mind and face have the same curves."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's a rare parent who can see his or her child clearly and objectively. At a school board meeting I attended . . . the only defin...ition of a gifted child on which everyone in the audience could agree was "mine."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that's what people observe. You... see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw. It's just extraordinary that we should have been given these peculiarities.... Something is ironic in the world and it has to do with the fact that what you intend never comes out like you intend it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And so they have left us feeling tired and old. They never cared for school anyway.... And they have left us with the things pinned on the bulletin board. And the night, the endless, muggy night that is invading our school.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I say this because there is an uneasiness in things just now. Waiting for something to be over before you are forced to notice it.... The pollarded trees scarcely bucking the wind and yet it's keen, it make you fall over. Clabbered sky. Seasons that pass with a rush.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »