I often think about the opening words of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of ti...mes." I know Dickens wasn't talking about one- to three- year-olds, but his words do capture the extremes of emotion that toddlers and their parents experience every day. Can there be a creature on earth as adorable--and as trying--as a toddler?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Basically the cleavage between the two cities is of the simplest: Dallas is where the east ends, and Fort Worth is notoriously "wh...ere the west begins." Dallas is a baby Manhattan; Fort Worth is a cattle annex. Dallas has the suave and glittering clothes of Neiman Marcus; Fort Worth has dust and stockyards. For this a perfectly good historical reason exists. The Texas and Pacific Railway, reaching Dallas from the east in 1872, stopped there; the line was not pushed the few miles westward to Fort Worth till 1876. And in the intervening years dozens of big eastern firms--mercantile establishments, distributors, and the like--got nicely settled in Dallas, and have stayed there ever since. Dallas was the end of the line.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Today the two cities seem to stand in contrast to each another. Florence has become a bustling and vital modern city. Whilst it ma...y no longer nurture Michelangelos and Botticellis, there are native Florentine painters of international renown. Its ancient craft of leatherwork plays a distinctive role in contemporary fashion, and Florentines have effectively revived the old skills with stuffs and dyes and organized their distribution on a scale which dwarfs the network of the once ubiquitous Medici banks. Venice instead is apparently a city belonging only to her past, an empty shell of former glories. Its native population diminishes constantly, deserting the island for the industrial wasteland that threatens to destroy what is left of millennial grandeur. Its last remaining industry makes baubles for the tourists who come in droves to stay on a statistical average of eighteen hours, to mill about and to gawk at the remaining relics of the Seremissima's magnificence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of ...belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The centuries-long wars with the Saracen, when everything of the East was the enemy, and the subsequent, now over, era of Western ...imperialism, when Eastern cultures were despised by us, have caused a block in European thinking, making it hard for us to acknowledge what we all owe to the East. Two great religions have influenced Europe, we say: Christianity and Judaism, but we scarcely mention Islam, which has been the third. We are the heirs, we claim proudly, of Greece and Rome, but seldom think of the Arabs, the Persians, the Moors, who, through Spain, fed culture into a Europe that was considered a poor and backward place, with a culture far below the dazzling civilizations of the cities of North Africa, Spain, the Middle East, India.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am thy father's spirit, Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,... And for the day confined to fast in fires, Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid To tell the secrets of my prison house, I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres, Thy knotted and combined locks to part, And each particular hair to stand on end Like quills upon the fretful porpentine. But this eternal blazon must not be To ears of flesh and blood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »