It's true we Americans don't know very much about you Japanese and never did. And now I realize you know even less about us. You c...an kill us, all of us or part of us, but if you think that's going to put the fear of God into the United States of America and stop them from sending other flyers to bomb you, you're wrong--dead wrong. They'll come by night, and they'll come by day--thousands of them. They'll blacken your skies and burn your cities to the ground and make you get down on your knees and beg for mercy. You wanted it. You asked for it. You started it. And now you're going to get it. And it won't be finished until your dirty little empire is wiped off the face of the earth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How to attain sufficient clarity of thought to meet the terrifying issues now facing us, before it is too late, is ... important. ...Of one thing I feel reasonably sure: we can't stop to discuss whether the table has or hasn't legs when the house is burning down over our heads. Nor do the classics per se seem to furnish the kind of education which fits people to cope with a fast-changing civilization.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
'I told him, Look at all those fightings and killings down there, What's the matter? Why don't you put a stop to it?... 'I try, he said--That's all he could do, he looked tired. He's a bachelor so long, and he likes lentil soup.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the last fifteen years or so, the women's novel has turned into the Amtrak of American literature; crashing through the gates a...t Aristotle, jumping the tracks at Horace, ignoring the flashing red lights at Boileau, and scooping up Alexander Pope in the cowcatcher. The rules are down and it's every stylist for herself in this best of all Tupperware parties, where plot and characterization have been replaced by the kind of non-stop chatter that enabled the French Foreign Legion to meet its enlistment quota for a hundred and fifty years. In the unlikely event that future scholars will bother to give our era a cultural tag, it will be called the Age of Women's Litter.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People having speech defects sometimes learn part of the practice by laborious study, but good speech is always mainly unconscious... speech. Any tennis player, even if he could not explain this enigma, could provide an analogy for it. When he sees a rapidly flying tennis ball coming toward him, he knows what he must do. He must maneuver himself into the proper position, be poised with his weight properly distributed, meet the ball with the proper sweep of his arm and with his racket held at just the right pitch, and all this must be timed to stop the flying ball at a precise point. But if the tennis player pauses to think of all these actions and how he will perform them, he is lost. The ball will not skim back over the net, building air pressure as it goes until it buzzes down into the opponent's corner. If the tennis player thinks about anything except where he wants the ball to go and what he plans for the next stroke, he will probably become so awkward that he will be lucky to hit the ball at all. Rapid, precise muscular actions can be successfully carried out only by the unconscious part of the brain. And so with the speaker. He cannot speak well unless he speaks unconsciously, for his movements are as precise, as complicated, and as exactly timed as those of the tennis player.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Manuela, why are you crying? Hit the ball down the line, please. Stop crying, thank you. Use some topspin on your backhand now. Pl...ease stop crying. Thank you.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We laugh at him who steps out of his room at the very moment when the sun steps out, and says: "I will the sun to rise"; and at hi...m who cannot stop the wheel, and says: "I will it to roll"; and at him who is taken down in a wrestling match, and says: "I lie here, but I will that I lie here!" And yet, all laughter aside, do we ever do anything other than one of these three things when we use the expression, "I will"?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Jack Cade, John Brown, Jesse James, There too I could sit down and stop for a while.... I think I could tell their headstones: "God, let me remember all good losers."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Shall, then, the maple yield sugar, and not man? Shall the farmer be thus active, and surely have so much sugar to show for it, be...fore this very March is gone,--while I read the newspaper? While he works in his sugar-camp let me work in mine,--for sweetness is in me, and to sugar it shall come,--it shall not all go to leaves and wood. Am I not a sugar maple man, then? Boil down the sweet sap which the spring causes to flow within you. Stop not at syrup,--go on to sugar, though you present the world with but a single crystal,--a crystal not made from trees in your yard, but from the new life that stirs in your pores. Cheerfully skim your kettle, and watch it set and crystallize, making it a holiday of it if you will. Heaven will be propitious to you as to him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one ...is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. I am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may sometime get up again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »