Both Look Homeward, Angel and Tristram Shandy defy formal analysis. Both are concerned with the education of the very young. Both ...see that education as essentially the product of the impact of the world outside upon the young mind. Both describe that education through memories in maturity.... Both books are family novels, particularly rich in brilliantly rich, hyperbolically presented family portraits.... Both men were remarkably proficient at capturing the individual cadences of human speech and reproducing them with sharp accuracy, and both delighted in the rhetorically extravagant; so that their works present, not a unified style, but a medley of styles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I heard the word "stream" uttered with such a revolting primness, what I think of is urine and not the contemporary novel. An...d besides, it isn't new, it is far from the dernier cri. Shakespeare used it continually, much too much in my opinion, and there's Tristam Shandy, not to mention the Agamemnon.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One of the few moments of happiness a man knows in Australia is that moment of meeting the eyes of another man over the tops of tw...o beer glasses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When a man gives himself up to the government of a ruling passion,--or, in other words, when his HOBBY-HORSE grows head- strong,--...farewell cool reason and fair discretion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Writing, when properly managed ... is but a different name for conversation: As no one ... would venture to talk all;Mso no author..., who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good breeding, would presume to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the reader's understanding, is to ... leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What these perplexities of my uncle Toby were,--'tis impossible for you to guess;Mif you could,--I should blush ... as an author; ...inasmuch as I set no small store by myself upon this very account, that my reader has never yet been able to guess at any thing. And ... if I thought you was able to form the least ... conjecture to yourself, of what was to come in the next page,--I would tear it out of my book.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[My father] was serious;Mhe was all uniformity;Mhe was systematical, and, like all systematick reasoners, he would move both heave...n and earth, and twist and torture every thing in nature to support his hypothesis.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If death, said my father, reasoning with himself, is nothing but the separation of the soul from the body;--and if it is true that... people can walk about and do their business without brains,--then certes the soul does not inhabit there. Q.E.D.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »