The great leading distinction between writing and speaking is, that more time is allowed for the one than the other, and hence dif...ferent faculties are required for, and different objects attained by each. He is properly the best speaker who can collect together the greatest number of apposite ideas at a moment's warning; he is properly the best writer who can give utterance to the greatest quantity of valuable knowledge in the course of his whole life. The chief requisite for the one, then, appears to be quickness and facility of perception--for the other, patience of soul and a power increasing with the difficulties it has to master. He cannot be denied to be an expert speaker, a lively companion, who is never at a loss for something to say on every occasion or subject that offers. He, by the same rule, will make a respectable writer who, by dint of study, can find out anything good to say upon any one point that has not yet been touched upon before, or who by asking for time, can give the most complete and comprehensive view of any question. The one must be done off-hand, at a single blow; the other can only be done by a repetition of blows, by having time to think and do better.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hm, the beacon of the press. In the hell to which all journalists must descend when they die, Mr. Wiggam, we shall sit at red hot ...desks with quills of fire in our hand and spend eternity on eternity writing about the salubrious weather of that region. Let us serve our apprenticeship here thoroughly and intelligently.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Like rhetoric, writing is more highly organized than speech. What is more, it prides itself on transcending the boundaries of plac...e and time within which speech must be understood. And writing has propriety. Every writing system seems torn by conflicting impulses. On the one hand it wants to include within its scope all the subjects of language itself. Writing means to be the hard copy of human life. But at the same time every writing scheme has its taboos. Much as writing wants to be inclusive, there are some areas of life it either will not or cannot discuss as well as speech. This propriety is clear in traditional and classical civilizations, where certain themes like personal confession are never entertained in writing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Open the envelope quickly, O this is not our son's writing, yet his name is sign'd,... O a strange hand writes for our dear son, O stricken mother's soul! All swims before her eyes, flashes with black, she catches the main words only, Sentences broken, gunshot wound in the breast, cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital, At present low, but will soon be better.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing... it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... oh, I long to prove myself by writing! The best seems to die in me when I give it up. It is the self I love--not this efficien...t, philanthropic self.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My Christian friends, in bonds of love, whose hearts in sweetest union join, Your friendship's like a drawing band, yet we mu...st take the parting hand. Your company's sweet, your union dear; Your words delightful to my ear, Yet when I see that we must part, You draw like cords around my heart.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Since childhood, I have been enchanted by the fact and the symbolism of the right hand and the left--the one the doer, the other t...he dreamer. The right is order and lawfulness, le droit. Its beauties are those of geometry and taut implication. Reaching for knowledge with the right hand is science. Yet to say only that much of science is to overlook one of its excitements, for the great hypotheses of science are gifts carried in the right hand. Of the left hand we say that it is awkward and, while it has been proposed that art students can seduce their proper hand to more expressiveness by drawing first with the left, we nonetheless suspect this function. The French speak of the illegitimate descendent as being à main gauche, and, though the heart is virtually at the center of the thoracic cavity, we listen for it on the left. Sentiment, intuition, bastardy. And should we say that reaching for knowledge with the left hand is art? Again it is not enough, for as surely as the recital of a daydream differs from the well-wrought tale, there is a barrier between undisciplined fantasy and art. To climb the barrier requires a right hand adept at technique and artifice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand--a business as safe and commendable as ma...king soap or breakfast foods--or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »