Because humans are not alone in exhibiting such behavior--bees stockpile royal jelly, birds feather their nests, mice shred paper-...-it's possible that a pregnant woman who scrubs her house from floor to ceiling [just before her baby is born] is responding to a biological imperative . . . . Of course there are those who believe that . . . the burst of energy that propels a pregnant woman to clean her house is a perfectly natural response to their mother's impending visit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I wish the English still possessed a shred of the old sense of humour which Puritanism, and dyspepsia, and newspaper reading, and ...tea-drinking have nearly extinguished.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the gingham-mill, a broken thread or a shred spool spoils the web through a piece of a hundred yards, and is traced back to the... girl that wove it, and lessens her wages. The stockholder, on being shown this, rubs his hands with delight. Are you so cunning Mr. Profitloss, and do you expect to swindle your master and employer, in the web you weave? A day is more magnificent cloth than any muslin, the mechanism that makes it is infinitely cunninger, and you shall not conceal the sleazy, fraudulent, rotten hours you have slipped into the piece, nor fear that any honest thread, or straighter steel, or more inflexible shaft, will not testify in the web.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everything established, settled, everything to do with home and order and the common round, has crumbled into dust and been swept ...away in the general upheaval and reorganization of the whole of society. The whole human way of life has been destroyed and ruined. All that's left is the bare, shivering human soul, stripped to the last shred, the naked force of the human psyche for which nothing has changed because it was always cold and shivering and reaching out to its nearest neighbor, as cold and lonely as itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mackerel gulls were all the while flying over our heads and amid the breakers, sometimes two white ones pursuing a black one; quit...e at home in the storm, though they are as delicate organizations as sea-jellies and mosses; and we saw that they were adapted to their circumstances rather by their spirits than their bodies. Theirs must be an essentially wilder, that is, less human, nature, than that of larks and robins. Their note was like the sound of some vibrating metal and harmonized well with the scenery and roar of the surf, as if one had rudely touched the strings of the lyre, which ever lies on the shore; a ragged shred of ocean music tossed aloft on the spray.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »