Why should the generations overlap one another at all? Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty tho...usand pounds each wrapped round us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the Sphinx wasp does, to find that its papa and mamma have not only left ample provision at its elbow but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before we began to live consciously on our own accounts?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn't dis...cover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Although leadership and the exercise of power are distinguishable activities, they overlap and interweave in important ways. Consi...der a corporate chief executive officer who has the gift for inspiring and motivating people, who has vision, who lifts the spirits of employees with a resulting rise in productivity and quality of product, and a drop in turnover and absenteeism. That is leadership. But evidence emerges that the company is falling behind in the technology race. One day with the stroke of a pen the CEO increases the funds available to the research division. That is the exercise of power. The stroke of a pen could have been made by an executive with none of the qualities one associates with leadership.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties an...d cruelties; it accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[Our family is] a wonderfully messy arrangement, in which relationships overlap, underlie, support, and oppose one another. It did...n't always come together easily nor does it always stay together easily. It's known very good times and very bad ones. It has held together, often out of shared memories and hopes, sometimes out of the lure of my sisters' cooking, and sometimes out of sheer stubbornness. And like the world itself, our family is renewed by each baby.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A lady is nothing very specific. One man's lady is another man's woman; sometimes, one man's lady is another man's wife. Definitio...ns overlap but they almost never coincide.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a dee...p cut on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village, a phenomenon not very common on so large a scale.... When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before. Innumerable little streams overlap and interlace one with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half way the law of currents, and half way that of vegetation. As it flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on them, the lacinated, lobed, and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or you are reminded of coral, of leopard's paws or birds' feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds. It is a truly grotesque vegetation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »