I can just remember an old brown-coated man who was the Walton of this stream, who had come over from Newcastle, England, with his... son,--the latter a stout and hearty man who had lifted an anchor in his day. A straight old man he was, who took his way in silence through the meadows, having passed the period of communication with his fellows; his old experienced coat, hanging long and straight and brown as the yellow pine bark, glittering with so much smothered sunlight, if you stood near enough, no work of art but naturalized at length. I often discovered him unexpectedly amid the pads and the gray willows when he moved, fishing in some old country method,--for youth and age then went a-fishing together,--full of incommunicable thoughts, perchance about his own Tyne and Northumberland. He was always to be seen in serene afternoons haunting the river, and almost rustling with the sedge; so many sunny hours in an old man's life, entrapping silly fish; almost grown to be the sun's familiar; what need had he of hat or raiment any, having served out his time, and seen through such thin disguises? I have seen how his coeval fates rewarded him with the yellow perch, and yet I thought his luck was not in proportion to his years; and I have seen when, with slow steps and weighed down with aged thoughts, he disappeared with his fish under his low-roofed house on the skirts of the village. I think nobody else saw him; nobody else remembers him now, for he soon after died, and migrated to new Tyne streams. His fishing was not a sport, nor solely a means of subsistence, but a sort of solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world, just as the aged read their Bibles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or ...poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The novelist sets forth his characters in two ways, by direct comment upon them, or indirectly by reporting their actions and beha...vior and letting the report speak for itself. The portraitist uses the latter method only, translating everything into purely visual and self-sufficient terms. His problem is to fuse into a single unambiguous statement what he sees of a man and what he understands of him. The greater his selective faculty and power of communication the keener will be his portrait. Facial expressions and body gestures are a living language which we all have learned to read as a clue to, and use as a revelation, of character. A keen portraitist has a flair for this wordless language of the face, and simply by reporting the visible quantity of the body-soul equation he can give us insight into the hidden psychological quality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... research is never completed ... Around the corner lurks another possibility of interview, another book to read, a courthouse t...o explore, a document to verify.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Logic is the procession or proportionate unfolding of the intuition; but its virtue is as silent method; the moment it would appea...r as propositions, and have a separate value, it is worthless.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hallie: Ranse, do you think I could, I, I mean, grown up and all? Do you think I could learn to read? Ranse: Why sure you can..., Hallie. Why, there's nothing to it. It'd be, it'd be easy. Can you learn how to read? Why, I, I can teach you. A smart girl like you. Of course you can learn how to read. Now you wanna try? Hallie, I'll teach ya how. In no time you'll be reading everything. Hallie: It's awful worrisome not knowin' how. I know the good book from preacher talk. But it'd be a sole comfort if I could read the words for myself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Children who are not spoken to by live and responsive adults will not learn to speak properly. Children who are not answered will ...stop asking questions. They will become incurious. And children who are not told stories and who are not read to will have few reasons for wanting to learn to read.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »