One of the few graces of getting old--and God knows there are few graces--is that if you've worked hard and kept your nose to the ...grindstone, something happens: The body gets old but the creative mechanism is refreshed, smoothed and oiled and honed. That is the grace. That is what's happening to me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument y...ou write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Channing you have seen and described is the real Simon Pure. You have seen him. Many a good ramble may you have together! You ...will see in him still more of the same kind to attract and to puzzle you. How to serve him most effectually has long been a problem with his friends. Perhaps it is left for you to solve it. I suspect that the most you or any one can do for him is to appreciate his genius,--to buy and read, and cause others to buy and read, his poems. That is the hand which he has put forth to the world,--take hold of that. Review them if you can,--perhaps take the risk of publishing something more which he may write. Your knowledge of Cowper will help you to know Channing. He will accept sympathy and aid, but he will not bear questioning, unless the aspects of the sky are particularly auspicious. He will ever be "reserved and enigmatic," and you must deal with him at arm's length.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Employees from families where all adults work are still coping with rules and conditions of work designed, as one observer put it,... to the specifications of Ozzie and Harriet. These conditions include rigid adherence to a 40-hour workweek, a concept of career path inconsistent with the left cycle of a person with serious family responsibilities, notions of equity formed in a different era, and performance evaluation systems that confuse effort with results by equating hours of work with productivity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
These pages reproduce me very imperfectly, and there are many things in me of which I find no trace in them. I suppose it is becau...se, in the first place, sadness takes up the pen more readily than joy; and, in the next, because I depend so much upon surrounding circumstances. When there is no call upon me, and nothing to put me to the test, I fall back into melancholy; and so the practical man, the cheerful man, the literary man, does not appear in these pages. The portrait is lacking in proportion and breadth; it is one-sided, and wants a center; it has, as it were, been painted from too near.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Jim," she said earnestly, "if I was put down there in the middle of the night, I could find my way all over that little town; and... along the river to the next town, where my grandmother lived. My feet remember all the little paths through the woods, and where the big roots stick out to trip you. I ain't never forgot my own country."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I no longer fit in with these times. Great changes can come in four years. These socialistic notions of government are not of my d...ay. When I was in office, tax reduction, debt reduction, tariff stability and economy were the things to which I gave attention. We succeeded on those lines.... These new ideas call for new men to develop them.... We cannot put everything up to the Government without overburdening it. I have recently been told that I am one of the millions of Americans who will be afflicted with Alzheimer's Disease.... I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For Banquo's issue have I filed my mind; For them the gracious Duncan have I murdered;... Put rancors in the vessel of my peace Only for them; and mine eternal jewel Given to the common enemy of man, To make them kings, the seeds of Banquo kings!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »