A man's house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant assoc...iations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. And when he casts about for it he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an essential--there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. It was in that house. It is irrevocably lost.... It will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know the magnitude of his disaster.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There were none of the small deer up there; they are more common about the settlements. One ran into the city of Bangor two years ...before, and jumped through a window of costly plate glass, and then into a mirror, where it thought it recognized one of its kind.... This the inhabitants speak of as the deer that went a-shopping.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One who shows signs of mental aberration is, inevitably, perhaps, but cruelly, shut off from familiar, thoughtless intercourse, pa...rtly excommunicated; his isolation is unwittingly proclaimed to him on every countenance by curiosity, indifference, aversion, or pity, and in so far as he is human enough to need free and equal communication and feel the lack of it, he suffers pain and loss of a kind and degree which others can only faintly imagine, and for the most part ignore.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two ban...al dimensions, drained of color. Wasn't there something reassuring about it!--that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another's eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms--nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling Of their afflictions, and shall not myself,... One of their kind, that relish all as sharply Passion as they, be kindlier moved than thou art?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They were two strong men, these oddly different generals, and they represented the strengths of two conflicting currents that, thr...ough them, had come into final collision. Back of Robert E. Lee was the notion that the old aristocratic concept might somehow survive and be dominant in American life. Lee was tidewater Virginia, and in his background were family, culture, and tradition.... Grant, the son of a tanner on the Western frontier, was everything Lee was not. He had come up the hard way and embodied nothing in particular except the eternal toughness and sinewy fiber of the men who grew up beyond the mountains. He was one of a body of men who owed reverence and obeisance to no one, who were self-reliant to a fault, who cared hardly anything for the past but who had a sharp eye for the future.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »