He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer. He had come upon it when already its glory was nearly spent. So in the b...uffalo times a traveller used to come upon the embers of a hunter's fire on the prairies, after the hunter was up and gone; the coals would be trampled out, but the ground was warm, and the flattened grass where he had slept and where his pony had grazed, told the story. This was the very end of the road-making West; the men who had put plains and mountains under the iron harness were old; some were poor, and even the successful ones were hunting for rest and a brief reprieve from death. It was already gone, that age; nothing could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and song of it, the visions those men had seen in the air and followed,--these he had caught in a kind of afterglow in their own faces,--and this would always be his.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Well, when you're up there and you're all alone, see, it's just you and your ship and the sky. And you don't want anybody up there... with you, you don't want anybody to spoil it. Everything's kind of still, and you have a feeling that you're halfway to heaven. You don't even seem to hear the sound of your own motor, just a kind of a buzz, like the sky was calling you. Like the sky was singin' you a song.... Yeah. And somehow it's never eight o'clock up there, it's always now. And the earth is so far below you that it just doesn't matter anymore, the sky is the thing that's important. The sky is your pal. You feel like nudging it and saying, "Hiya sky, how are you today? And how was the old moon the last time you saw him?" The wind drift comes straight off the morning star and beautiful white clouds drift towards you. And they're like old friends. Friends you never want to say goodbye to. And you see a patch of clear air in between 'em and you duck in and out, like a porpoise rollin' in the ocean. And then you say to yourself, "Boy, oh boy, this is the only time a man is really ever alive. It's the only time he's really ever free." The old sky smiles back at you and says, "Boy, you're right. You're dead right."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
According to fiction, the hillman is a seven-foot combination of malnutrition and hookworm, asleep on his front porch with the dog...s. His great bare feet, dangling off the porch, flap from time to time when the flies get too pesky, but nothing awakens him except a hound's salute to a stranger. Then he shoots up his astounding neck to its full length, ogles the visitor, and on his hunting horn blows a series of long and short blasts that means, "Hide yore stills and oil yore guns; they air a stranger h'yar."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One of the saddest sights of the slums is to see the thrifty wife of the working man, with her rosy brood of children, used to cou...ntry air and sunshine, used to space, privacy, good surroundings, cleanliness, quiet, shut up amid the noise and dirt and confusion, in the gloom of the slum.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air- conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the... middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Success and failure on the public level never mattered much to me, in fact I feel more at home with the latter, having breathed de...ep of its vivifying air all my writing life up to the last couple of years.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Ultimate Day really begins the night before, when you sit up until one o'clock trying to get things into trunk and bags. This ...is when you discover the well-known fact that summer air swells articles to twice or three times their original size.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
the bare eyes were before me And the hissing hair,... Held up at a window, seen through a door. The stiff bald eyes, the serpents on the forehead Formed in the air.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin--a la...nguage with which it has precious little in common. In Latin, to take one example, it is not possible to split an infinitive. So in English, the early authorities decided, it should not be possible to split an infinitive either. But there is no reason why we shouldn't, any more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they weren't available to the Romans. Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football. It is a patent absurdity. But once this insane notion became established, grammarians found themselves having to draw up ever more complicated and circular arguments to accommodate the inconsistencies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »