The most familiar sheet of water, viewed from a new hilltop, yields a novel and unexpected pleasure. When we have traveled a few m...iles, we do not recognize the profiles even of the hills which overlook our native village, and perhaps no man is quite familiar with the horizon as seen from the hill nearest to his house, and can recall its outline distinctly when in the valley. We do not commonly know, beyond a short distance, which way the hills range which take in our houses and farms in their sweep. As if our birth had at first sundered things, and we had been thrust up through into nature like a wedge, and not till the wound heals and the scar disappears do we begin to discover where we are, and that nature is one and continuous everywhere. It is an important epoch when a man who has always lived on the east side of a mountain, and seen it in the west, travels round and sees it in the east. Yet the universe is a sphere whose centre is wherever there is intelligence. The sun is not so central as a man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How else is the famous short story 'A study in Abjection' to be understood but as an outbreak of disgust against an age indecently... undermined by psychology.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Doing, a filthy pleasure is, and short; And done, we straight repent us of the sport:... Let us not then rush blindly on unto it, Like lustfull beasts, that onely know to doe it:LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A good short story is a work of art which daunts us in proportion to its brevity.... No inspiration is too noble for it; no amount... of hard work is too severe for it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is our life? a play of passion; Our mirth the music of division;... Our mothers' wombs the tiring-houses be Where we are dressed for this short comedy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath, I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base,... And speed glum heroes up the line to death,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I think a surgeon is particularly suited by temperament to the short story form as opposed to the novel, because the short story i...s rather like a surgical operation. It has a beginning, middle, and an end--at least my stories all do: you make an incision, you rummage around inside for a little while, then you stitch it up. Writing a short story is like taking out an inflamed appendix.... The act of making an incision is the creation of a wound for the purpose of healing the patient. The earliest forms of writing were exactly that: taking up a sharp rock and gouging out hieroglyphics in a flat stone--making wounds, as it were, to tell a story. The difference, of course, is that the surgical wound must heal, eventually, but the writer's wound does not.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »