The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the shadowy and of the Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, ...the powers of single blacks flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man's house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant assoc...iations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. And when he casts about for it he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an essential--there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. It was in that house. It is irrevocably lost.... It will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know the magnitude of his disaster.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I do not know if you remember the tale of the girl who saves the ship under mutiny by sitting on the powder barrel with her lighte...d torch ... and all the time knowing that it is empty? This has seemed to me a charming image of the women of my time. There they were, keeping the world in order ... by sitting on the mystery of life, and knowing themselves that there was no mystery.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find n...ot absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By many a legendary tale of violence and wrong, as well as by events which have passed before their eyes, these people have been t...aught to look upon white men with abhorrence.... I can sympathize with the spirit which prompts the Typee warrior to guard all the passes to his valley with the point of his levelled spear, and, standing upon the beach, with his back turned upon his green home, to hold at bay the intruding European.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... and the next summer she died in childbirth. That's all. Of course, there may be some sort of sequel but it is not known ...to me. In such cases instead of getting bogged down in guesswork, I repeat the words of the merry king in my favorite fairy tale: Which arrow flies for ever? The arrow that has hit its mark.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Good-by, my book! Like mortal eyes, imagined ones must close some day. Onegin from his knees will rise--but his creator strolls aw...ay. And yet the ear cannot right now part with the music and allow the tale to fade; the chords of fate itself continue to vibrate; and no obstruction for the sage exists where I have put The End: the shadows of my world extend beyond the skyline of the page, blue as tomorrow's morning haze--nor does this terminate the phrase.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars. A meteor makes a striking effect for a moment. You look up and cry... "There!" and it is gone forever. Planets and wandering stars last a much longer time. They often outshine the fixed stars and are confounded by them by the inexperienced; but this only because they are near. It is not long before they must yield their place; nay, the light they give is reflected only, and the sphere of their influence is confined to their orbit--their contemporaries. Their path is one of change and movement, and with the circuit of a few years their tale is told. Fixed stars are the only ones that are constant; their position in the firmament is secure; they shine with a light of their own; their effect today is the same as it was yesterday, because, having no parallax, their appearance does not alter with a difference in our standpoint. They belong not to one system, one nation only, but to the universe. And just because they are so very far away, it is usually many years before their light is visible to the inhabitants of this earth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »