As a father I had some trouble finding the words to separate the person from the deed. Usually, when one of my sons broke the rule...s or a window, I was too angry to speak calmly and objectively. My own solution was to express my feelings, but in an exaggerated, humorous way: "You do that again and you will be grounded so long they will call you Rip Van Winkle II," or "If I hear that word again, I'm going to braid your tongue."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Except for the beast fables, which are anciently derived from the world's multi-racial heritage, American Negro humor is rooted in... social oppression. And--again excepting the animal fables--it differs from classical Western and white American humor in another respect. It is totally devoid of those myth-making and myth-transmuting elements and symbols that appeal so deeply to the American mind in the works of the tall-tale tellers such as Davy Crockett, Seba Smith, Mike Fink, and Mark Twain. There are no Rip Van Winkles, Johnny Appleseeds, Paul Bunyans, or Calamity Janes--and none bearing the faintest resemblance to them--in Negro American humor. The myth-making figures in the literature of black Americans are the blues-haunted characters. They are Stagolee, John Henry, and Big Boy; they are Mary Lou, Frankie, and Sister Caroline. And they are not funny, least of all to the nameless hundreds of folk-Negroes who created them and the still-living thousands who love them and perpetuate them in song and story.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So, we'll go no more a-roving So late into the night,... Though the heart be still as loving, And the moon be still as bright. For the sword outwears its sheath, And the soul wears out the breast. And the heart must pause to breathe And love itself have rest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is commonly said, and more particularly by Lord Shaftesbury, that ridicule is the best test of truth; for that it will not stic...k where it is not just. I deny it. A truth learned in a certain light, and attacked in certain words, by men of wit and humour, may, and often doth, become ridiculous, at least so far, that the truth is only remembered and repeated for the sake of the ridicule.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So all that is said of the wise man by Stoic or Oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his ...unattained but attainable self.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nature will not let us fret and fume. She does not like our benevolence or our learning much better than she likes our frauds and ...wars. When we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the abolition-convention, or the temperance-meeting, or the transcendental club, into the fields and woods, she says to us, "so hot? my little Sir."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I can shake off everything if I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn. But, and that is the great question, will I eve...r be able to write anything great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer? I hope so, oh, I hope so very much, for I can recapture everything when I write, my thoughts, my ideals and my fantasies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... she was a woman. She had been taught from her earliest childhood to make use of this talent which God had endowed her, would b...e an outrage against society; so she lived for a few years, going through the routine of breakfasts and dinners, journeys and parties, that society demanded of her, and at last sank into her grave, after having been of little use to the world or herself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »