Just as the French of the nineteenth century invested their surplus capital in a railway-system in the belief that they would make... money by it in this life, in the thirteenth they trusted their money to the Queen of Heaven because of their belief in her power to repay it with interest in the life to come.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Paris is the city in which one loves to live. Sometimes I think this is because it is the only city in the world where you can ste...p out of a railway station--the Gare D'Orsay--and see, simultaneously, the chief enchantments: the Seine with its bridges and bookstalls, the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Tuileries Gardens, the Place de la Concorde, the beginning of the Champs Elysees--nearly everything except the Luxembourg Gardens and the Palais Royal. But what other city offers as much as you leave a train?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
During a walk or in a book or in the middle of an embrace, suddenly I awake to a stark amazement at everything. The bare fact of e...xistence paralyzes me... To be alive is so incredible that all I can do is to lie still and merely breathe--like an infant on its back in a cot. It is impossible to be interested in anything in particular while overhead the sun shines or underneath my feet grows a single blade of grass.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I can't quite define my aversion to asking questions of strangers. From snatches of family battles which I have heard drifting up ...from railway stations and street corners, I gather that there are a great many men who share my dislike for it, as well as an equal number of women who ... believe it to be the solution to most of this world's problems.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Perfect present has no existence in our consciousness. As I said years ago in Erewhon, it lives but upon the sufferance of past an...d future. We are like men standing on a narrow footbridge over a railway. We can watch the future hurrying like an express train towards us, and then hurrying into the past, but in the narrow strip of present we cannot see it. Strange that that which is the most essential to our consciousness should be exactly that of which we are least definitely conscious.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Green, green is El Aghir. It has a railway station, And the wealth of its soil has borne many another fruit:... A mairie, a school and an elegant Salle de Fetes. Such blessings, as I remarked, in effect, to the waiter, Are added unto them that have plenty of water.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care; They pursued it with forks and hope;... They threatened its life with a railway-share They charmed it with smiles and soap.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The sea was wet as wet could be, The sands were dry as dry.... You could not see a cloud, because No cloud was in the sky: No birds were flying overhead-- There were no birds to fly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Her personality had an architectonic quality; I think of her when I see some of the great London railway termini, especially St. P...ancras, with its soot and turrets, and she overshadowed her own daughters, whom she did not understand--my mother, who liked things to be nice; my dotty aunt. But my mother had not the strength to put even some physical distance between them, let alone keep the old monster at emotional arm's length.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just as the sentence contains one idea in all its fullness, so the paragraph should embrace a distinct episode; and as sentences s...hould follow one another in harmonious sequence, so paragraphs must fit into another like the automatic couplings of railway carriages.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »