I once heard a woman laugh at that most tragic moment in all drama, the off-stage shot in "The Wild Duck," and I afterward had her... killed, so there will be no more of that out of her.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Probably nature itself gave man the ability to lie so that in difficult and tense moments he could protect his nest, just as do th...e vixen and wild duck.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild... thinking in Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the scriptures and mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us. As the wild duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild--mallard--thought, which 'mid falling dews wings its way above the fens. A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself,--and not a taper lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A marriage based on full confidence, based on complete and unqualified frankness on both sides; they are not keeping anything back...; there's no deception underneath it all. If I might so put it, it's an agreement for the mutual forgiveness of sin.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
With a bending sail we glided rapidly by Tyngsborough and Chelmsford, each holding in one hand half of a tart country apple pie wh...ich we had purchased to celebrate our return, and in the other a fragment of the newspaper in which it was wrapped, devouring these with divided relish, and learning the news which had transpired since we sailed. The river here opened into a broad and straight reach of great length, which we bounded merrily over before a smacking breeze, with a devil-may-care look in our faces, and our boat a white bone in its mouth, and a speed which greatly astonished some scow boatmen whom we met. The wind in the horizon rolled like a flood over valley and plain, and every tree bent to the blast, and the mountains like school-boys turned their cheeks to it.... Thus we sailed, not being able to fly, but as next best, making a long furrow in the fields of the Merrimack toward our home, with our wings spread, but never lifting our heel from the watery trench; gracefully plowing homeward with our brisk and willing team, wind and stream, pulling together, the former yet a wild steer, yoked to his more sedate fellow. It was very near flying, as when the duck rushes through the water with an impulse of her wings, throwing the spray about her before she can rise. How we had stuck fast if drawn up but a few feet on the shore!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »