|
6f829e0
|
Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, wheras literature teaches us to notice. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life.
|
|
literature
fiction
james-wood
|
James Wood |
|
2c9e6f0
|
The tale of someone's life begins before they are born.
|
|
|
Michael Wood |
|
8057a31
|
We walk the paths we choose.
|
|
|
Barbara Wood |
|
6e8fc2d
|
Never listen to fools who dis as being a story about a girl who gets her mean man. This is a character who gets what she wants and lives on her own terms by having moral fortitude, intelligence, courage, imagination and a will of iron. And that is one hell of a checklist. Imagine Charlotte Bronte writing this book in 1847. What a powerful story for women living at that time!
|
|
women-s-strength
|
Fiona Wood |
|
5bf7601
|
The idea of labor, of hard work, leading to increased productivity was so novel, so radical, in the overall span of Western history that most ordinary people, most of those who labored, could scarcely believe what was happening to them. Labor had been so long thought to be the natural and inevitable consequence of necessity and poverty that most people still associated it with slavery and servitude. Therefore any possibility of oppression, ..
|
|
radicalism
labor
prosperity
|
Gordon S. Wood |
|
0861be3
|
Virtue became less the harsh and martial self-sacrifice of antiquity and more the modern willingness to get along with others for the sake of peace and prosperity.
|
|
virtue
entomology
|
Gordon S. Wood |
|
9afb1c7
|
Victor waited until Ozols had passed out of the light before squeezing the trigger with smooth, even pressure. Suppressed gunshots interrupted the early morning stillness. Ozols was hit in the sternum, twice in rapid succession. The bullets were low powered, subsonic 5.7 mm, but larger rounds could have been no more fatal. Copper-encased lead tore through skin, bone, and heart before lodging side by side between vertebrae. Ozols collapsed b..
|
|
|
Tom Wood |
|
e643ea0
|
Don't worry," she says. "Ernest always attracted obsessives. You were only one of many. And secretly, sometimes, I think he was flattered. Nobody ever stalked Fitzgerald."
|
|
hemingway
|
Naomi Wood |
|
f6e99c5
|
Funny, because the way I see it, the more friends I have, the better I'm doing at life." "Ah," Victor said, "but friends can be bought. Enemies are always earned."
|
|
|
Tom Wood |
|
0208045
|
I]f you live today you breathe in nihilism. In or out of the Church it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now
|
|
|
Ralph C. Wood |
|
4082e48
|
to shrink the circle of intimate community to the smallest possible circumference. This is the spoiling of faithful friendship.
|
|
|
Ralph C. Wood |
|
54d729a
|
Intellectual activity in a culture is not a one-way flow between the great minds and passive recipients; it is a discourse, a complex marketplace-like conglomeration of intellectual exchanges involving many participants all trying to manipulate the ideas available to them in order to explain, justify, lay blame for, or otherwise make sense of what is happening around them. Everyone, not just the great minds, participates in this complicated..
|
|
philosophy
history-of-thought
|
Gordon S. Wood |
|
7219975
|
Life was theater, and impressions one made on spectators were what counted. Public leaders had to become actors or characters, masters of masquerade.
|
|
|
Gordon S. Wood |
|
b80c92b
|
The partition window opened. Panic flooded through him and he twisted in his seat to see Kooi's wife. She had a gun, pointed through the little window and at his head. 'We can talk about this,' Leeson said, swallowing. 'I can make you a very wealthy woman.' She said, 'Put your hands over your ears, Peter, and close your eyes.
|
|
|
Tom Wood |
|
c368958
|
No one was infallible, but mistakes had to be acknowledged and absorbed with a conscious self-examination if they were to become useful experience and not remain as failure.
|
|
|
Tom Wood |
|
be4f679
|
Tom felt his skin crawl as he laid eyes on the center of the pool. A great, awful thing towered over him from the tiny island. Its gnarled, flesh-colored roots were planted in the lake of offal like drowned snakes, drawing its sick nourishment.
|
|
|
Brian Geoffrey Wood |
|
c439d48
|
Perhaps this is what Henry James meant when he talked about the "irresponsibility" of characters. Characters are irresponsible, art is irresponsible when compared to life, because it is first and foremost important that a character be real, and as readers or watchers we tend to applaud any effort made towards the construction of that reality. We do not, of course, indulge actual people in the world this way at all. In real life, the fact th..
|
|
morality
life
fiction-writing
|
James Wood |
|
69b7de6
|
He says not to list the patients we save but the ones we don't kill.
|
|
|
Barbara Wood |
|
f8c87e9
|
Tolkien reveals that our personalities take on the quality of our acts. Outward behavior manifests inward convictions, whether for good or ill. "The good man out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil man out of his evil treasure produces evil; for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks" (Luke 6:45)."
|
|
|
Ralph C. Wood |
|
282d96c
|
Tolkien understands the odd danger posed by virtue cut off from the Good. Over and again, he demonstrates his fundamental conviction that evil preys upon our virtues far more than our vices. Our very strengths and assets-whether intelligence or bravery, diligence or loyalty or beauty, but especially righteousness-may dispose us either to scorn those who lack such virtues, or else to employ our gifts for our own selfish ends.
|
|
|
Ralph C. Wood |
|
7ef381e
|
Although he trusted the good sense of the people in the long run, he believed that they could easily be misled by demagogues. He was a realist who had no illusions about human nature. "The motives which predominate most human affairs," he said, "are self-love and self-interest." The common people, like the common soldiers in his army, could not be expected to be "influenced by any other principles than those of interest."
|
|
|
Gordon S. Wood |
|
bb05191
|
The Civil War was the climax of a tragedy that was preordained from the time of the Revolution. Only with the elimination of slavery could this nation that Jefferson had called "the world's best hope" for democracy even begin to fulfill its great promise."
|
|
|
Gordon S. Wood |
|
2fa7965
|
In monarchies, each man's desire to do what was right in his own eyes could be restrained by beer, or force, by patronage, or by honor, and by professional standing armies. By contrast, republics had to hold themselves together from the bottom up, ultimately.
|
|
virtue
republicanism
law
government
|
Gordon S. Wood |
|
fca14a5
|
By contrast, said Jefferson, the Southerners were "fiery, voluptuary, indolent, unsteady, independent, zealous for their own liberties but trampling on those of others, generous, candid, without attachment or pretensions to any religion but that of the heart."
|
|
|
Gordon S. Wood |
|
81f0fa1
|
As Oliver Ellsworth, the third chief justice of the United States, declared, "As population increases, poor labourers will be so plenty as to render slaves useless. Slavery in time will not be a speck in our country."42 The leaders simply did not count on the remarkable demographic capacity of the slave states themselves, especially Virginia, to produce slaves for the expanding areas of the Deep South and the Southwest."
|
|
|
Gordon S. Wood |
|
0cb1328
|
These multiplying societies treated the sick, aided the industrious poor, housed orphans, fed imprisoned debtors, built huts for shipwrecked sailors, and, in the case of the Massachusetts Humane Society, even attempted to resuscitate those suffering from "suspended animation," that is, those such as drowning victims who appeared to be dead but actually were not. The fear of being buried alive was a serious concern at this time. Many, like W..
|
|
|
Gordon S. Wood |
|
1224a42
|
Only "those few, who being attached to no particular occupation themselves," said Smith, "have leisure and inclination to examine the occupations of other people."
|
|
|
Gordon S. Wood |
|
04115cb
|
John Adams] is vain, irritable, and a bad calculator of the force and probable effect of the motives which govern men. This is all the ill which can possibly be said of him.
|
|
john-adams
thomas-jefferson
|
Gordon S. Wood |
|
216758d
|
It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god; it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg"--"
|
|
|
Gordon S. Wood |
|
4042da5
|
Victor said, 'I'm going to take this axe and I'm going to hack off one of your hands. The blade is dull and I couldn't find a whetstone so it might take a couple of blows to do the job, so you'll need to be patient. The pain and the fear will be like nothing you've ever experienced, but the horror of watching the stump where your wrist used to be spray blood everywhere is going to be like nothing you can even imagine. At that point you won'..
|
|
|
Tom Wood |
|
87bc2ae
|
The whole basement was empty. Victor drew his handgun -- an FN Five-seven -- because he knew he'd walked straight into a trap. A second later, the lights went out
|
|
|
Tom Wood |
|
369c9c6
|
I don't know what you will say to me for introducing you into the privacy of Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins's bed-chamber, but it is really necessary to do so. We cannot very well get on without it.
|
|
|
Mrs. Henry Wood |
|
0f46c1e
|
What cough do you call it?" went on Roland Yorke--you may have guessed he was the speaker. "A churchyard cough?" "Well, I don't know, sir," said Jenkins. "It has been called that, before now. I dare say it will be the end of me at last." "Cool!" remarked Roland. "Cooler than I should be, if I had a cough, or any plague of the sort, that was likely to be my end. Does it trouble your mind, Jenkins?"
|
|
|
Mrs. Henry Wood |
|
c9b298e
|
Every good thing will come with time that we may earnestly seek," said Mr. Carlyle. "Oh, Barbara, never forget--never forget that the only way to ensure peace in the end is to strive always to be doing right, unselfishly under God."
|
|
|
Mrs. Henry Wood |
|
050c9fd
|
The poor prayed to become rich, and the rich prayed to become richer.
|
|
|
Barbara Wood |
|
c166084
|
Here Tolkien states, in indirect form, one of the deepest of Christian truths: all love that is not ordered to the love of God turns into hatred.
|
|
|
Ralph C. Wood |
|
7f24477
|
To console Pippin about the treachery of Gollum, Gandalf reminds him that "a traitor may betray himself and do good that he does not intend" (3.89)."
|
|
|
Ralph C. Wood |
|
66e0f3a
|
What makes Galadriel such a remarkable figure is her serenity amidst the coming defeat of her realm and her people. Far from resigning herself to any sort of fatalism, she desires only that the ought shall become the is: "Yet if you [Frodo] succeed, then our power is diminished, and Lothlorien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away. We must depart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and..
|
|
|
Ralph C. Wood |
|
edab1e0
|
Sam Gamgee is the ultimate hero of The Lord of the Rings because he is the ultimate servant.
|
|
|
Ralph C. Wood |
|
03c0f4b
|
satirical against those who called him an escapist for creating the fantastic world of Middle-earth: "The notion that motor-cars are more `alive' than, say, centaurs or dragons is curious; that they are more `real' than, say, horses is pathetically absurd. How real, how startlingly alive is a factory chimney compared with an elm-tree: poor obsolete thing, insubstantial dream of an escapist!" (MC, 149)."
|
|
|
Ralph C. Wood |
|
057c16d
|
173 despots would surely be as oppressive as one," wrote Jefferson in 1785 in his Notes on the State of Virginia. "An elective despotism was not the government we fought for."31"
|
|
|
Gordon S. Wood |
|
5131d87
|
it seemed likely to slide them back into the traditional status of servants or slaves, into the older world where labor was merely a painful necessity and not a source of prosperity.
|
|
|
Gordon S. Wood |
|
aa2355f
|
republics required sufficient virtue in the character of their citizens to prevent corruption and eventual decay.
|
|
|
Gordon S. Wood |
|
38b2f5f
|
As William Plumer of New Hampshire complained, "It is impossible to censure measures without condemning men."
|
|
|
Gordon S. Wood |