On starlight nights I used to pace up and down those long, cold streets, scowling at the little, sleeping houses on either side, w...ith their storm-windows and covered back porches. They were flimsy shelters, most of them poorly built of light wood, with spindle porch-posts horribly mutilated by the turning-lathe. Yet for all their frailness, how much jealousy and envy and unhappiness some of them managed to contain! The life that went on in them seemed to me made up of evasions and negations; shifts to save cooking, to save washing and cleaning, devices to propitiate the tongue of gossip. This guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. People's speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed. Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At poor peace I sing To you strangers (though song... Is a burning and crested act, The fire of birds in The world's turning wood, For my sawn, splay sounds)....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Indian remarked as before, "Must have hard wood to cook moose-meat," as if that were a maxim, and proceeded to get it. My comp...anion cooked some in California fashion, winding a long string of the meat round a stick and slowly turning it in his hand before the fire. It was very good. But the Indian, not approving of the mode, or because he was not allowed to cook it his own way, would not taste it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
it was older sure than this year's cutting, Or even last year's or the year's before.... The wood was gray and the bark warping off it And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and ...the hunched courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O hurry to the ragged wood, for there I will drive all those lovers out and cry... O my share of the world, O yellow hair! No one has ever loved but you and I.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Like vinegar on a wound is one who sings songs to a heavy heart. Like a moth in clothing or a worm in wood, sorrow gnaws at the hu...man heart.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For lack of wood the fire goes out, and where there is no whisperer, quarreling ceases. As charcoal is to hot embers and wood to f...ire, so is a quarrelsome person for kindling strife.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »