The true novel wrestles on the edge of understanding, lying about on all sides desperately, for every sort of experience, pressing... into use every flash of intuition or correspondence, trying to fuse together the crudest of materials, and the humblest, which the higher arts can't include. But it is precisely here, where the writer fights with the raw, the intractable, that poetry is born. Poetry, that is, of the novel: appropriate to it. The Story of an African Farm is a poetic novel; and when one has done with the "plot" and the characters, that is what remains: an endeavor, a kind of hunger, that passionate desire for growth and understanding, which is the deepest pulse of human beings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The c...reatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...it's dynamite to spend future earnings. I have had a taste of it myself, and it's mighty bitter. A debt is a debt, whether it's... margins or mortgages; and debts are all the same, no matter how you try to camouflage 'em. You never get much out of 'em except trouble. On the farm or in Wall Street, if you use the other fellow's money, it costs you a lot more than it's worth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To market, to market, to buy a fat pig; Home again, home again, jiggety jig.... To market, to market, to buy a fine hog; Home again, home again, joggety jog.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
On the farm I had learned how to meet realities without suffering either mentally or physically. My initiative had never been blun...ted. I had freedom to succeed--freedom to fail. Life on the farm produces a kind of toughness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If the underdog were always right, one might quite easily try to defend him. The trouble is that very often he is but obscurely ri...ght, sometimes only partially right, and often quite wrong; but perhaps he is never so altogether wrong and pig-headed and utterly reprehensible as he is represented to be by those who add the possession of prejudices to the other almost insuperable difficulties of understanding him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
St. Joseph in 1859 had the bustling appearance of a great fair, with excited travelers preparing to make the plains journey in pra...irie schooners, "rickety old farm wagons," and even small two-wheeled push carts. many bore such mottoes as--"Faint Heart Never Won Fair Lady," "I Dare," "For Pike's Peak Ho." Before long many were to return, disappointed in their search for gold, hungry, ragged, and dispirited, their brave wagon boasts changed to "Prodigal Son," "Pike's Hell," "A Fool Is Born."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Cow and horse dung, as muck goes, are relatively agreeable. You can even become nostalgic about them. They smell of fermented grai...n, and on the far side of their smell there is hay and grass. Chicken shit is disagreeable and rasps the throat because of the quantity of ammonia. When you are cleaning out the henhouse, you're glad to go to the door and take a deep breath of fresh air. Pig and human excrement, however, smell the worst because men and pigs are carnivorous and their appetites are indiscriminate. The smell includes the sickeningly sweet one of decay. And on the far side of it is death.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »