But the strong and healthy yeoman and husbands of the land, the self-sustaining class of inventive and industrious men, fear no co...mpetition or superiority. Come what will, their faculty cannot be spared.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is an immense loss to have all robust and sustaining expletives refined away from one! At ... moments of trial refinement is a ...feeble reed to lean upon.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I mourn the safe and motherly old middle-class queen, who held the nation warm under the fold of her big, hideous Scotch-plaid sha...wl and whose duration had been so extraordinarily convenient and beneficent. I felt her death much more than I should have expected; she was a sustaining symbol--and the wild waters are upon us now.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the event of an oxygen shortage on airplanes, mothers of young children are always reminded to put on their own oxygen mask fir...st, to better assist the children with theirs. The same tactic is necessary on terra firma. There's no way of sustaining our children if we don't first rescue ourselves. I don't call that selfish behavior. I call it love.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Parents vary in their sense of what would be suitable repayment for creating, sustaining, and tolerating you all those years, and ...what circumstances would be drastic enough for presenting the voucher. Obviously there is no repayment that would be sufficient . . . but the effort to call in the debt of life is too outrageous to be treated as anything other than a joke.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Semi-Saracenic architecture, sustaining itself as if by miracle in mid air; glittering in the red sunlight with a hundred oriels, ...minarets, and pinnacles; and seeming the phantom handiwork, conjointly, of the Sylphs,... the Fairies,... the Genii, and ... the Gnomes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Why, he was met even now As mad as the vexed sea, singing aloud,... Crowned with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds, With hardocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers, Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow In our sustaining corn.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks after I came to t...he woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was something unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery. In the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of ...mathematics, of physics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »