If the oarsmen of a fast-moving ship suddenly cease to row, the suspension of the driving force of the oars doesn't prevent the ve...ssel from continuing to move on its course. And with a speech it is much the same. After he has finished reciting the document, the speaker will still be able to maintain the same tone without a break, borrowing its momentum and impulse from the passage he has just read out.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O friend unseen, unborn, unknown, Student of our sweet English tongue,... Read out my words at night, alone: I was a poet, I was young.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Shut out that stealing moon, She wears too much the guise she wore... Before our lutes were strewn With years-deep dust, and names we read On a white stone were hewn.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however naïve that may hav...e been, it was a good deal less naïve than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Why are we never quite at ease in the presence of a schoolmaster? Because we are conscious that he is not quite at his ease in our...s. He is awkward, and out of place in the society of his equals. He comes like Gulliver from among his little people, and he cannot fit the stature of his understanding to yours.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He was last seen flying to New York. He was handing out cards which read:... "He wears a question in his left eye. He dislikes the police but will associate with them. He will demand something not on the menu. He is invisible to the eyes of beauty and culture...."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out.... Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him... who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most literature on the culture of adolescence focuses on peer pressure as a negative force. Warnings about the "wrong crowd" read ...like tornado alerts in parent manuals. . . . It is a relative term that means different things in different places. In Fort Wayne, for example, the wrong crowd meant hanging out with liberal Democrats. In Connecticut, it meant kids who weren't planning to get a Ph.D. from Yale.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Books, books, books! I had found the secret of a garret-room... Piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large,--where, creeping in and out Among the giant fossils of my past, Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there At this or that box, pulling through the gap, In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, The first book first. And how I felt it beat Under my pillow, in the morning's dark, An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »