The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still,--and there was so much sky, more than ...at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one's feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Go, and catch a falling star, Get with child a mandrake root,... Tell me, where all past years are, Or who cleft the devil's foot, Teach me to her mermaids singing, Or to keep off envy's stinging, And find What wind Serves to advance an honest mind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Time, which shows so vacant, indivisible, and divine in its coming, is slit and peddled into trifles and tatters. A door is to be ...painted, a lock to be repaired. I want wood, or oil, or meal, or salt; the house smokes, or I have a headache; then the tax; and an affair to be transacted with a man without heart or brains; and the stinging recollection of an injurious or very awkward word,--these eat up the hours.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now you know very well that there are no less than fifty-eight different pieces in a violin. These pieces are strangers to each ot...her, and it takes a century, more or less, to make them thoroughly acquainted. At last they learn to vibrate in harmony, and the instrument becomes an organic whole, as if it were a great seed-capsule which had grown from a garden-bed in Cremona, or elsewhere. Besides, the wood is juicy and full of sap for fifty years or so, but at the end of fifty or hundred years gets tolerably dry and comparatively resonant. Don't you see that all this is just as true of a poem? Counting each word as a piece, there are more pieces in an average copy of verses than in a violin. The poet has forced all these words together, and fastened them, and they don't understand it at first. But let the poem be repeated aloud and murmured over in the mind's muffled whisper often enough, and at length the parts become knit together in such absolute solidarity that you could not change a syllable without the whole world's crying out against you for meddling with the harmonious fabric. Observe, too, how the drying process takes place in the stuff of a poem just as in that of a violin.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the capsule biography by which most of the people knew one another, I was understood to be an Air Force pilot whose family was ...wealthy and lived in the East, and I even added the detail that I had a broken marriage and drank to get over it.... I sometimes believed what I said and tried to take the cure in the very real sun of Desert D'Or with its cactus, its mountain, and the bright green foliage of its love and its money.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
this frenzy, like bees stinging the heart all morning,... will keep the angels with their windows open, wide as an English bathtub.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The feminization of America has made emotions sacrosanct while condemning as cold and unfeeling rigorous concepts such as duty and... honor. Propelled by incessant hosannas to woman's "finer" this and "softer" that, we make emotional decisions instead of ethical ones and then congratulate ourselves for having "heart."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »