Figure him there, with his scrofulous diseases, with his great greedy heart, and unspeakable chaos of thoughts; stalking mournful ...as a stranger in this Earth; eagerly devouring what spiritual thing he could come at: school-languages and other merely grammatical stuff, if there were nothing better! The largest soul that was in all England.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 »
Here are a couple of generalisations about England that would be accepted by almost all observers. One is that the English are not... gifted artistically. They are not as musical as the Germans or Italians, painting and sculpture have never flourished in England as they have in France. Another is that, as Europeans go, the English are not intellectual. They have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic "world view." Nor is this because they are "practical," as they are so fond of claiming for themselves. One has only to look at their methods of town-planning and water-supply, their obstinate clinging to everything that is out-of-date and a nuisance, a spelling system that defies analysis and a system of weights and measures that is intelligible only to compilers of arithmetic books, to see how little they care about mere efficiency.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched upla...nds; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks which the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets. Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts,--from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb,--heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festal board,--may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last! I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The era of the Wild Apple will soon be past. It is a fruit which will probably become extinct in New England.... Since the tempera...nce reform and the general introduction of grafted fruit, no native apple trees, such as I see everywhere in deserted pastures, and where the woods have grown up around them, are set out. I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man, there are many pleasures which he will not know!... Now that they have grafted trees, and pay a price for them, they collect them into a play by their houses, and fence them in,--and the end of it all will be that we shall be compelled to look for our apples in a barrel.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I reverently believe that the Maker who made us all makes everything in New England but the weather. I don't know who makes that, ...but I think it must be raw apprentices in the weather-clerk's factory who experiment and learn how.... In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four-and-twenty hours.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mr. Lely, I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but remark all these... roughnesses, pimples, warts, and everything as you see me, otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Saigon was an addicted city, and we were the drug: the corruption of children, the mutilation of young men, the prostitution of wo...men, the humiliation of the old, the division of the family, the division of the country--it had all been done in our name.... The French city ... had represented the opium stage of the addiction. With the Americans had begun the heroin phase.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »