Who knows what true loneliness is--not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The ...most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion. Now and then a fatal conjunction of events may lift the veil for an instant. For an instant only. No human being could bear a steady view of moral solitude without going mad.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All the old supports going, gone, this man reaches out a hand to steady himself on a ledge of rough brick that is warm in the sun:... his hand feeds him messages of solidity, but his mind messages of destruction, for this breathing substance, made of earth, will be a dance of atoms, he knows it, his intelligence tells him so: there will soon be war, he is in the middle of war, where he stands will be a waste, mounds of rubble, and this solid earthy substance will be a film of dust on ruins.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know. What falls away is always. And is near.... I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I have to go.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I'm going to take you down and show you our cemetery. I've got a waiting list of fifty people at that cemetery just dying to get i...n. But I like you and I'm going to shove you in ahead of all of them. I'm going to see that you get a steady position and if I can arrange it, it will be horizontal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Competence in heterosexuality, or at least the appearance or pretense of such competence, is as much a public affair as a private ...one. Thus, going steady is a high school diploma in heterosexuality; engagement a BA; marriage an MA; and children a Ph.D.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Some keep the Sabbath going to Church-- I keep it, staying at Home--... With a Bobolink for a Chorister-- And an Orchard, for a Dome--LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
God preaches,--a noted clergyman,-- And the sermon is never long;... So instead of getting to heaven at last, I'm going all along!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It seems, just now, To be happening so very fast;... Despite all the land left free For the first time I feel somehow That it isn't going to last....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Before I left home seven years ago I used to walk endlessly at night along the streets, tormented because there was a barrier betw...een me and the steady solemn magnificence of those skies whose brilliance beat the thin little town into the soil. I saw them, but I was alien to them. This barrier is the urgent necessity of doing the next thing, of getting on with the business of living; whatever it is that drives us on. But on that first night there was no barrier, nothing; and I was effortlessly and at once in immediate intimacy with the soil and its creatures.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »