We walk along the cliff, and I feel a sudden impulse to push you over, which I promptly do: I acted on impulse, yet I certainly in...tended to push you over, and may even have devised a little ruse to achieve it; yet even then I did not act deliberately, for I did not (stop to) ask myself whether to do it or not.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Histories of the world omitted China; if a Chinaman invented compass or movable type or gunpowder we promptly "forgot it" and name...d their European inventors. In short, we regarded China as a sort of different and quite inconsequential planet.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mother came to us destitute. She brings a child into the world, takes one look at him and promptly dies. Without leaving so much a...s a forwarding name and address.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While I am in favor of the Government promptly enforcing the laws for the present, defending the forts and collecting the revenue,... I am not in favor of a war policy with a view to the conquest of any of the slave States; except such as are needed to give us a good boundary. If Maryland attempts to go off, suppress her in order to save the Potomac and the District of Columbia. Cut a piece off of western Virginia and keep Missouri and all the Territories.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not book-learning young men need, nor instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause th...em to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies: do the thing--"Carry a message to Garcia!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At the stumbling of a horse, the fall of a tile, the slightest pin prick, let us promptly chew on this: Well, what if it were deat...h itself? And thereupon let us stiffen and fortify ourselves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One would like to know more of that race, now extinct, whose seines lie rotting in the garrets of their children, who openly profe...ssed the trade of fishermen, and even fed their townsmen creditably, not skulking through the meadows to a rainy afternoon sport. Dim visions we still get of miraculous draughts of fishes, and heaps uncountable by the riverside, from the tales of our seniors sent on horseback in their childhood from the neighboring towns, perched on saddle-bags, with instructions to get the one bag filled with shad, the other with alewives. At least one memento of those days may still exist in the memory of this generation, in the familiar appellation of a celebrated train-band of this town, whose untrained ancestors stood creditably at Concord North Bridge. Their captain, a man of piscatory tastes, having duly warned his company to turn out on a certain day, they, like obedient soldiers, appeared promptly on parade at the appointed time, but, unfortunately, they went undrilled, except in the manvres of a soldier's wit and unlicensed jesting, that May day; for their captain, forgetting his own appointment, and warned only by the favorable aspect of the heavens, as he had often done before, went a-fishing that afternoon, and his company thenceforth was known to old and young, grave and gay, as "The Shad."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »