I think, for the rest of my life, I shall refrain from looking up things. It is the most ravenous time-snatcher I know. You pull o...ne book from the shelf, which carries a hint or a reference that sends you posthaste to another book, and that to successive others. It is incredible, the number of books you hopefully open and disappointedly close, only to take down another with the same result.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... no book ... ever competed with the Bible. The story of Ruth was better than Ramona, and the poetry of Job was better than Long...fellow. I still have my first big Bible, carefully underlined through with red and black ink, and interleafed [sic] with painfully written manuscript pages.... Margery and I earned our five cents a week for church and a penny for Sunday school by learning three verses of the Bible a day and six on Sunday. We learned dozens and dozens of chapters. I supposed "Evangeline" and "Hiawatha" were better poetry, but I didn't like them so well.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is much in the Bible against which every instinct of my being rebels, so much that I regret the necessity which has compelle...d me to read it through from beginning to end. I do not think that the knowledge which I have gained of its history and sources compensates me for the unpleasant details it has forced upon my attention.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse... of my book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of ...my book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Knowledge is happiness, because to have knowledge--broad, deep knowledge--is to know true ends from false, and lofty things from l...ow. To know the thoughts and deeds that have marked man's progress is to feel the great heart-throbs of humanity through the centuries; and if one does not feel in these pulsations a heavenward striving, one must indeed be deaf to the harmonies of life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I sometimes wonder if the hand is not more sensitive to the beauties of sculpture than the eye. I should think the wonderful rhyth...mical flow of lines and curves could be more subtly felt than seen. Be this as it may, I know that I can feel the heart- throbs of the ancient Greeks in their marble gods and goddesses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Imagination, industry, and intelligence--"the three I's"Mare all indispensable to the actress, but of these three the greatest is,... without doubt, imagination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I ha...ve to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night ... shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »