We visited Whitman the next morning ... and were much interested and provoked. He is apparently the greatest democrat the world ha...s seen. Kings and aristocracy go by the board at once, as they have long deserved to. A remarkably strong though coarse nature, of a sweet disposition, and much prized by his friends. Though peculiar and rough in his exterior, his skin ... red, he is essentially a gentleman. I am still somewhat in a quandry about him,--feel that he is essentially strange to me, at any rate; but I am surprised by the sight of him. He is very broad, but, as I have said, not fine. He said that I misapprehended him. I am not quite sure that I do. He told us that he loved to ride up and down Broadway all day on an omnibus, sitting beside the driver, listening to the roar of the carts, and sometimes gesticulating and declaiming Homer at the top of his voice. He has long been an editor and writer for the newspapers,... but now has no employment but to read and write in the forenoon, and walk in the afternoon, like the rest of the scribbling gentry.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I may be smelly and I may be old, Rough in my pebbles, reedy in my pools,... But where my fish float by I bless their swimming And I like the people to bathe in me, especially women.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Miss Dudley ... gives one the idea of a lightly-sparred yacht in mid- ocean; unexpected; you ask yourself what the devil she is d...oing there. She sails gaily along, though there is no land in sight and plenty of rough weather coming. She never read a book, I believe, in her life. She tries to paint, but she is only a second-rate amateur and will never be any thing more, though she has done one or two things which I give you my word I would like to have done myself. She picks up all she knows without an effort and knows nothing well, yet she seems to understand whatever is said. Her mind is as irregular as her face, and both have the same peculiarity. I notice that the lines of her eyebrows, nose and mouth all end with a slight upward curve like a yacht's sails, which gives a kind of hopefulness and self-confidence to her expression. Mind and face have the same curves."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I've stayed in the front yard all my life. I want a peek at the back... Where it's rough and untended and hungry weed grows. A girl gets sick of a rose.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The real world is not easy to live in. It is rough; it is slippery. Without the most clear-eyed adjustments we fall and get crushe...d. A man must stay sober: not always, but most of the time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A ...conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All the old supports going, gone, this man reaches out a hand to steady himself on a ledge of rough brick that is warm in the sun:... his hand feeds him messages of solidity, but his mind messages of destruction, for this breathing substance, made of earth, will be a dance of atoms, he knows it, his intelligence tells him so: there will soon be war, he is in the middle of war, where he stands will be a waste, mounds of rubble, and this solid earthy substance will be a film of dust on ruins.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I kept in mind that the minute it got too rough, the minute the fourteen-hour days became too long, the minute people started to b...e naggy and frustrating, I knew that I could walk away and there were over seventy-nine thousand women who would trade shoes with me in a second.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This luxury of the precocious child, Time's precious chronic invalid,--... would we, darlings, resign it if we could? Our blight has been our sinecure: mere talent was enough for us-- glitter in fragments and rough drafts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »