They have thus dammed all the larger lakes, raising their broad surfaces many feet ... thus turning the forces of nature against h...erself, that they might float their spoils out of the country. They rapidly run out of these immense forests all the finer, and more accessible pine timber, and then leave the bears to watch the decaying dams, not clearing nor cultivating the land, nor making roads, nor building houses, but leaving it a wilderness as they found it. In many parts, only these dams remain, like deserted beaver-dams. Think how much land they have flowed, with out asking Nature's leave!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fanta...sies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is tro...ubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Run fast, stand still. This, the lesson from lizards. For all writers. Observe almost any survival creature, you see the same. Jum...p, run, freeze. In the ability to flick like an eyelash, crack like a whip, vanish like steam, here this instant, gone the next--life teems the earth. And when that life is not rushing to escape, it is playing statues to do the same. See the hummingbird, there, not there. As thought arises and blinks off, so this thing of summer vapor; the clearing of a cosmic throat, the fall of a leaf. And where it was--a whisper. What can we writers learn from lizards, lift from birds? In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping. In between the scurries and flights, what? Be a chameleon, ink- blend, chromosome change with the landscape. Be a pet rock, lie with the dust, rest in the rainwater in the filled barrel by the drainspout outside your grandparents' window long ago.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Their holders have always seemed to me like a woman who should undertake at a state fair to run a sewing machine, under pretense o...f advertising it, while she had never spent an hour in learning its use.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You've strung your breasts with a rattling rope of pearls,... tied a jangling belt around those deadly hips and clinking jewelled anklets on both your feet. So, stupid, if you run off to your lover like this, banging all these drums, then why do you shudder with all this fear and look up, down; in every direction?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My first big mistake was made when, in a moment of weakness, I consented to learn the game; for a man who can frankly say "I do no...t play bridge" is allowed to go over in the corner and run the pianola by himself, while the poor neophyte, no matter how much he may protest that he isn't "at all a good player, in fact I'm perfectly rotten," is never believed, but dragged into a game where it is discovered, too late, that he spoke the truth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Please your honors," said he, "I'm able, By means of a secret charm, to draw... All creatures living beneath the sun, That creep, or swim, or fly, or run, After me so as you never saw! And I chiefly use my charm On creatures that do people harm, The mole, and toad, and newt, and viper; And people call me the Pied Piper."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They raise their minds by brooding over and embellishing their sufferings, from one degree of fervid exaltation and dreary greatne...ss to another, till at length they run amuck entirely, and whoever meets them would do well to run them thro' the body.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »