All my life I have lived and behaved very much like [the] sandpiper--just running down the edges of different countries and contin...ents, "looking for something" ... having spent most of my life timorously seeking for subsistence along the coastlines of the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
'Tis very much like light, a thing that everybody knows, and yet none can tell what to make of it: 'Tis not money, fortune, joyntu...re, raving, stabbing, hanging, romancing, flouncing, swearing, ramping, desiring, fighting, dying, though all those have been, are, and still will be mistaken and miscalled for it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Even though I had let them choose their own socks since babyhood, I was only beginning to learn to trust their adult judgment.. . .... I had a sensation very much like the moment in an airplane when you realize that even if you stop holding the plane up by gripping the arms of your seat until your knuckles show white, the plane will stay up by itself. . . . To detach myself from my children . . . I had to achieve a condition which might be called loving objectivity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If a joyous elephant should break forth into song, his lay would probably be very much like Whitman's famous "Song of Myself." It ...would have just about as much delicacy and deftness and discrimination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Blake is very much like Beethoven in his artistic independence and universality. Like Beethoven, he is a pioneer Romantic of that ...heroic first generation which thought that the flames of the French Revolution would burn down all fetters. Like Beethoven, he asserts the creative freedom of the imagination within his work and makes a new world of thought out of it. There sounds all through Blake's poetry ... that lyric despair mingled with quickness to exaltation, that sense of a primal intelligence fighting the mind's limitations, that brings Beethoven's last quartets so close to absolute meditation and the Ninth Symphony to a succession of triumphal marches. What is nearest and first in both men is so strong a sense of their own identity that they are always reaching beyond man's conception of his powers. In both there is a positive assertion against suffering, an impa tience with forms and means. As Beethoven said of the violinist who complained of the difficulty of one of the Rasumofsky quartets--"Does he really suppose I think of his puling little fiddle when the spirit speaks to me and I compose something?"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While with us the relation of adults to children (like that of the husband to the wife) is from the sociological point of view ver...y much like that of master and servant, in America youth enjoys much more extensive rights. The result may often be regarded by the European as a lack of respect, disobedience, and libertinism, but it is not regarded in America, since the adult does not ask for respect and subordination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy.... Translation is very m...uch like copying paintings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Some men are judges, these August days, sitting on benches, even till the court rises; they sit judging there honorably, between t...he seasons and between meals, leading a civil, politic life, arbitrating ... it may be, from highest noon until the red vesper sinks into the west. The fisherman, meanwhile, stands in three feet of water, under the same summer's sun, arbitrating in other cases between muck-worm and shiner, amid the fragrance of water-lilies, mint, and pontederia, leading his life many rods from the dry land, within a pole's length of where the larger fishes swim. Human life is to him very much like a river.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It further said, "The inhabitants of Sandwich generally manifest a fond and steady adherence to the manners, employments and modes... of living which characterized their fathers," which made me think that they were, after all, very much like the rest of the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »