Allusion has been made to [Proust's] contempt for the literature that "describes," for the realists and naturalists worshipping th...e offal of experience, prostrate before the epidermis and the swift epilepsy, and content to transcribe the surface, the façade, behind which the Idea is prisoner.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Tea! Thou soft, thou sober, sage, and venerable liquid, thou innocent pretence for bringing the wicked of both sexes together in a... morning; thou female tongue-running, smile-smoothing, heart- opening, wink-tipping cordial, to whose glorious insipidity I owe the happiest moment of my life, let me fall prostrate thus, and ... adore thee.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not enough for us to prostrate ourselves under the tree which is Creation, and to contemplate its tremendous branches filled... with stars. We have a duty to perform, to work upon the human soul, to defend the mystery against the miracle, to worship the incomprehensible while rejecting the absurd; to accept, in the inexplicable, only what is necessary; to dispel the superstitions that surround religion--to rid God of His Maggots.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is no longer beauty except in the struggle. No more masterpieces without an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent a...ssault against the unknown forces in order to overcome them and prostrate them before men.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So spake our Father penitent; nor Eve Felt less remorse. They, forthwith to the place... Repairing where he judged them, prostrate fell Before him reverent, and both confessed Humbly their faults, and pardon begged, with tears Watering the ground, and with their sighs the air Frequenting, sent from hearts contrite, in sign Of sorrow unfeigned and humiliation meek.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Lo, thus, as prostrate, \'In the dust I write My heart's deep languor and my soul's sad tears.'... Yet why evoke the spectres of black night To blot the sunshine of exultant years?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This burnt land was an exceedingly wild and desolate region. Judging by the weeds and sprouts, it appeared to have been burnt abou...t two years before. It was covered with charred trunks, either prostrate or standing, which crocked our clothes and hands, and we could not easily have distinguished a bear there by his color. Great shells of trees, sometimes unburnt without, or burnt on one side only, but black within, stood twenty or forty feet high. The fire had run up inside, as in a chimney, leaving the sap-wood. Sometimes we crossed a rocky ravine fifty feet wide, on a fallen trunk; and there were great fields of fire-weed (Epilobium angustifolium) on all sides, the most extensive that I ever saw, which presented great masses of pink. Intermixed with these were blueberry and raspberry bushes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That which we kept off, and toward which the waves were driving, was as dreary and harborless a shore as you can conceive. For hal...f a dozen rods in width it was a perfect maze of submerged trees, all dead and bare and bleaching, some standing half their original height, others prostrate, and criss-across, above or beneath the surface, and mingled with them were loose trees and limbs and stumps, beating about. Imagine the wharves of the largest city in the world, decayed, and the earth and planking washed away, leaving the spiles standing in loose order, but often of twice the ordinary height, and mingled with and beating against them the wreck of ten thousand navies, all their spars and timbers, while there rises from the water's edge the densest and grimmest wilderness, ready to supply more material when the former fails, and you may get a faint idea of that coast. We could not have landed if we would.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would alway...s find himself in a new country or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest-trees.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »