Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present. For ...what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The improved American highway system ... isolated the American-in-transit. On his speedway ... he had no contact with the towns wh...ich he by-passed. If he stopped for food or gas, he was served no local fare or local fuel, but had one of Howard Johnson's nationally branded ice cream flavors, and so many gallons of Exxon. This vast ocean of superhighways was nearly as free of culture as the sea traversed by the Mayflower Pilgrims.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man and a woman are new to one another throughout a life-time, in the rhythm of marriage that matches the rhythm of the year. Se...x is the balance of male and female in the universe, the attraction, the repulsion, the transit of neutrality, the new attraction, the repulsion, always different, always new.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We only seem to learn from Life that Life doesn't matter so much as it seemed to do--it's not so burningly important, after all, w...hat happens. We crawl, like blinking sea-creatures, out of the Ocean onto a spur of rock, we creep over the promontory bewildered and dazzled and hurting ourselves, then we drop in the ocean on the other side: and the little transit doesn't matter so much.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and ...God.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My esoteric doctrine, is that if you entertain any doubt, it is safest to take the unpopular side in the first instance. Transit f...rom the unpopular, is easy ... but from the popular to the unpopular is so steep and rugged that it is impossible to maintain it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The man who busies himself overmuch with the workings of his own soul cannot help being confronted by a common, melancholy, but ra...ther curious phenomenon: namely, he witness the sudden death of an insignificant memory that a chance occasion causes to be brought back from the humble and remote almshouse where it had been completing quietly its obscure existence. It blinks, it is still pulsating and reflecting light--but the next moment, under your very eyes, it breathes one last time and turns up its poor toes, having not withstood the too abrupt transit into the harsh glare of the present.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There stands a gig in the gray morning, in the mist, the impatient traveler pacing the wet shore with whip in hand, and shouting t...hrough the fog after the regardless Charon and his retreating ark, as if he might throw that passenger overboard and return forthwith for himself; he will compensate him. He is to break his fast at some unseen place on the opposite side. It may be Ledyard or the Wandering Jew. Whence, pray, did he come out of the foggy night? and wither through the sunny day will he go? We observe only his transit; important to us, forgotten by him, transiting all day.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This hunter, who was a quite small, sunburnt man, having already carried his canoe over, and baked his loaf, had nothing so intere...sting and pressing to do as to observe our transit. He had been out a month or more alone. How much more wild and adventurous his life than that of the hunter in Concord woods, who gets back to his house and the mill-dam every night! Yet they in the towns who have wild oats to sow commonly sow them on cultivated and comparatively exhausted ground. And as for the rowdy world in the large cities, so little enterprise has it that it never adventures in this direction, but like vermin clubs together in alleys and drinking-saloons, its highest accomplishment, perchance, to run beside a fire-engine and throw brickbats. But the former is comparatively an independent and successful man, getting his living in the way that he likes, without disturbing his human neighbors. How much more respectable also is the life of the solitary pioneer or settler in these, or any woods,--having real difficulties, not of his own creation, drawing his subsistence directly from nature,--than that of the helpless multitudes in the towns who depend on gratifying the extremely artificial wants of society and are thrown out of employment by hard times!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »