A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morni...ng light, at noon and by moonlight.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...I am useless, one more girl who couldn't be sold. When I visit the family now, I wrap my American successes around me like a pr...ivate shawl. I am worthy of eating the food. From afar I can believe my family loves me fundamentally. They only say, "When fishing for treasures in the flood, be careful not to pull in girls," because that is what one says about daughters. But I watched such words come out of my own mother's and father's mouths; I looked at their ink drawing of poor people snagging their neighbors' flotage with long flood hooks and pushing the girl babies on down the river. And I had to get out of hating range. I read in an anthropology book that Chinese say, "Girls are necessary too"; I have never heard the Chinese I know make this concession. Perhaps it was a saying in another village.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
'Tis certain, greatness, once fallen out with fortune, Must fall out with men too. What the declined is,... He shall as soon read in the eyes of others As feel in his own fall.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
From an old ruined fort on Staten Island, I have loved to watch all day some vessel whose name I had read in the morning through t...he telegraph glass, when she first came upon the coast, and her hull heaved up and glistened in the sun, from the moment when the pilot and most adventurous news-boats met her, past the Hook, and up the narrow channel of the wide bay, till she was boarded by the health officer, and took her station at quarantine, or held on her unquestioned course to the wharves of New York. It was interesting, too, to watch the less adventurous newsman, who made his assault as the vessel swept through the Narrows, defying plague and quarantine law, and, fastening his little cockboat to her huge side, clambered up and disappeared in the cabin. And then I could imagine what momentous news was being imparted by the captain, which no American ear had ever heard, that Asia, Africa, Europe--were all sunk; for which at length he pays the price, and is seen descending the ship's side with his bundle of newspapers,... to dispose of his wares to the highest bidder, and we shall ere long read something startling,--"By the latest arrival,"M"by the good ship--M."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The fort was the first institution that was founded here, and it is amusing to read in Champlain how assiduously they worked at it... almost from the first day of settlement. The founders of the colony thought this an excellent site for a wall,--and no doubt it was a better site, in some respects, for a wall than for a city,--but it chanced that a city got behind it. It chanced too, that a Lower Town got before it, and clung like an oyster to the outside of the crags, as you may see at low tide. It is as if you were to come to a country village surrounded by palisades in the old Indian fashion,--interesting only as a relic of antiquity and barbarism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; and, for the mos...t part, the only difference between us and our fellow is that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You become a reader because you saw and heard someone you admired enjoying the experience, someone led you to the world of books e...ven before you could read, let you taste the magic of stories, took you to the library, and allowed you to stay up later at night to read in bed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A book is not an autonomous entity: it is a relation, an axis of innumerable relations. One literature differs from another, be it... earlier or later, not because of the texts but because of the way they are read: if I could read any page from the present time--this one, for instance--as it will be read in the year 2000, I would know what the literature of the year 2000 would be like.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »