We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in race...s, even alone in genders.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A person taking stock in middle age is like an artist or composer looking at an unfinished work; but whereas the composer and the ...painter can erase some of their past efforts, we cannot. We are stuck with what we have lived through. The trick is to finish it with a sense of design and a flourish rather than to patch up the holes or merely to add new patches to it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In general the newly sighted see the world as a dazzle of color-patches. They are pleased by the sensation of color, and learn qui...ckly to name the colors, but the rest of seeing is tormentingly difficult.... It oppresses them to realize, if they ever do at all, the tremendous size of the world, which they had previously conceived of as something touchingly manageable. It oppresses them to realize that they have been visible to people all along, perhaps unattractively so, without their knowledge or consent. A disheartening number of them refuse to use their new vision, continuing to go over objects with their tongues, and lapsing into apathy and despair.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Initially, between the trees, he caught sight of whirling, jumping bodies. Heya-hey-heya. Someone climbing. Rocks pitched after a ...board; and on the river, tilting patches of reflection. Heya-fulla-heya-heya. Boys were sliding down the bank on their buttocks, roughing the scaly sand. They sailed a can lid on the water where at first it turned, floating, then sank, burning like a mirror. Hiyah-smilah. Hee-mee? Coltch. Skirts rose slowly, slowly subsided. A parasol flew open with a snap. Or-rawk. Gah. Houf. Half buried in the shingle, a deep red brick was then awash. Yo-yo giggy. Teetoo Sheek? Num! Lissa-lissa. A willow leaned out, trailing its leaves in the water.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross, Clearly used to silence and an armchair:... Tonight the wife and children will be quiet At slammed door and smoker's cough in the hall.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A good story is one that isn't demanding, that proceeds from A to B, and above all doesn't remind us of the bad times, the cardboa...rd patches we used to wear in our shoes, the failed farms, the way people you love just up and die. It tells us instead that hard work and perseverance can overcome all obstacles; it tells lie after lie, and the happy ending is the happiest lie of all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The reason that I call my doctrine logical atomism is because the atoms that I wish to arrive at as the sort of last residue in an...alysis are logical atoms and not physical atoms. Some of them will be what I call 'particulars'Msuch things as little patches of color or sounds, momentary things--and some of them will be predicates or relations and so on.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Soldier, there is a war between the mind And sky, between thought and day and night. It is... For that the poet is always in the sun, Patches the moon together in his room To his Virgilian cadences, up down, Up down. It is a war that never ends.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
From the foundation of a wooden observatory ... we could see Monadnock, in simple grandeur, in the northwest, rising nearly a thou...sand feet higher, still the "far blue mountain," though with an altered profile. The first day the weather was so hazy that it was in vain we endeavored to unravel the obscurity. It was like looking into the sky again, and the patches of forest here and there seemed to flit like clouds over a lower heaven. As to voyagers of an aerial Polynesia, the earth seemed like a larger island in the ether; on every side, even as low as we, the sky shutting down, like an unfathomable deep, around it, a blue Pacific island, where who knows what islanders inhabit? and as we sail near its shores we see the waving of trees and hear the lowing of kine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »