A black pall, you know, with a silver cross on it, or R.I.P.--requiescat in pace--you know. That seems to me the most beautiful ex...pression--I like it much better than 'He is a jolly good fellow,' which is simply rowdy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
On starlight nights I used to pace up and down those long, cold streets, scowling at the little, sleeping houses on either side, w...ith their storm-windows and covered back porches. They were flimsy shelters, most of them poorly built of light wood, with spindle porch-posts horribly mutilated by the turning-lathe. Yet for all their frailness, how much jealousy and envy and unhappiness some of them managed to contain! The life that went on in them seemed to me made up of evasions and negations; shifts to save cooking, to save washing and cleaning, devices to propitiate the tongue of gossip. This guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. People's speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed. Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Seyton. The Queen, my lord, is dead. Macbeth. She should have died hereafter;... There would have been a time for such a word.-- Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Though I am not much acquainted with the works of Goethe, I should say that it was one of his chief excellences as a writer, that ...he was satisfied with giving an exact description of things as they appeared to him, and their effect upon him. Most travelers have not self-respect enough to do this simply, and make objects and events stand around them as the centre, but still imagine more favorable positions and relations than the actual ones, and so we get no valuable report from them at all. In his "Italian Travels" Goethe jogs along at a snail's pace, but always mindful that the earth is beneath and the heavens are above him. His Italy is not merely the fatherland of lazzaroni and virtuosi, and scene of splendid ruins, but a solid turf-clad soil, daily shined on by the sun, and nightly by the moon. Even the few showers are faithfully recorded. He speaks as an unconcerned spectator, whose object is faithfully to describe what he sees, and that, for the most part, in the order in which he sees it. Even his reflections do not interfere with his descriptions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks ...say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his compan...ions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which hears, however measured or far away.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thank Heaven, here is not all the world. The buckeye does not grow in New England, and the mockingbird is rarely heard here. The w...ild goose is more of a cosmopolite than we; he breaks his fast in Canada, takes a luncheon in the Ohio, and plumes himself for the night in a southern bayou. Even the bison, to some extent, keeps pace with the seasons, cropping the pastures of the Colorado only till a greener and sweeter grass awaits him by the Yellowstone. Yet we think that if rail fences are pulled down, and stone walls piled up on our farms, bounds are henceforth set to our lives and our fates decided. If you are chosen town clerk, forsooth, you cannot go to Tierra del Fuego this summer; but you may go to the land of infernal fire nevertheless.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The American spring is by no means so agreeable as the American autumn; both move with faltering step, and slow; but this lingerin...g pace, which is delicious in autumn, is most tormenting in the spring.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »