To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lone...ly, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It's forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there's a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I first took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to spend my nights as well as days there, which, by accident, was on In...dependence Day, or the Fourth of July, 1845, my house was not finished for winter, but was merely a defence against the rain, without plastering or chimney, the walls being of rough, weather-stained boards, with wide chinks, which made it cool at night. The upright white hewn studs and freshly planed door and window casings gave it a clean and airy look, especially in the morning, when its timbers were saturated with dew, so that I fancied that by noon some sweet gum would exude from them. To my imagination it retained throughout the day more or less of this auroral character, reminding me of a certain house on a mountain which I had visited a year before. This was an airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess might trail her garments. The winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music. The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it. Olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The widow Douglas, she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, ...considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn't stand it no longer, I lit out. I got into my old rags, and my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied. But Tom Sawyer, he hunted me up and said he was going to start a band of robbers, and I might join if I would go back to the widow and be respectable. So I went back.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[The Settlement House] must be grounded in a philosophy whose foundation is on the solidarity of the human race, a philosophy whic...h will not waver when the race happens to be represented by a drunken woman or an idiot boy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The women who take husbands not out of love but out of greed, to get their bills paid, to get a fine house and clothes and jewels;... the women who marry to get out of a tiresome job, or to get away from disagreeable relatives, or to avoid being called an old maid--these are whores in everything but name. The only difference between them and my girls is that my girls gave a man his money's worth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is an old saying in the town that "most any fellow with a chaw in his jaw can sit on his front porch and spit down the chimney ...of a neighbor's house."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In Tsegihi, In the house made of dawn,... In the house made of the evening twilight, In the house made of the dark cloud, ... Oh, male divinity! With your moccasins of dark cloud, come to us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At the Denver House, a hastily erected log structure roofed and partitioned with canvas, described by Horace Greeley in 1859 as "T...he Astor House of the Gold Fields," orchestra leader Jones and his spirited men were interrupted by sporadic but not unforeseen bursts of gunfire that sent them diving for shelter behind a low iron-plated enclosure. Before the smoke had fairly cleared away, they were up again desperately playing and singing: Ha, boys, ho! Ain't you glad you're out of the wilderness, Ain't you glad you're out of the wilderness? Ha, boys, ho!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Western hospitality prevails; it is reminiscent of the kind displayed earlier here by a host who said to an unexpected guest, "Str...anger, you take the wold skin and the chaw o' sowbelly--I'll rough it."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the drea...mer, the house allows one to dream in peace.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »