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44804a6 The harassed look is that of a desperately tired swimmer or runner; yet there is no question of stopping. The creature we are watching will struggle on and on until it drops. Not because it is heroic. It can imagine no alternative. Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many faces within its face - the face of the child, the boy, the young man, the not-so-young-man - all present still, preserved as fossils, dead. Their message to this.. living Christopher Isherwood
ca22009 I could never keep anybody for long. And that's because I'm the type which every man imagines he wants, until he gets me; and then he finds he doesn't really, after all. Christopher Isherwood
9301f44 I've always made it a rule to have a suit for every day of the week. Perhaps you'll tell me I'm vain, but you'd be surprised if you knew what it had meant to me, at critical moments of my life, to be dressed exactly in accordance with my mood. It gives one such confidence, I think. Christopher Isherwood
4df45ef The game is cruel; but its cruelty is sensual and stirs George into hot excitement. He feels a thrill of pleasure to find the senses so eager in their response; too often, now, they seem sadly jaded. From his heart, he thanks these young animals for their beauty. And they will never know what they have done to make this moment marvelous to him, and life itself less hateful.... Christopher Isherwood
b8bcf89 And now an hour, maybe, has passed. And they are both drunk: Kenny fairly, George very. But George is drunk in a good way, and one that he seldom achieves. He tries to describe to himself what this kind of drunkenness is like. Well - to put it very crudely - it's like Plato; it's a dialogue. A dialogue between two people. Yes, but not a Platonic dialogue in the hair-splitting, word-twisting, one-up-to-me sense; not a mock-humble bitching ma.. Christopher Isherwood
2535324 I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father's or his mother's or his neighbor's instead. The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do. Henry David Thoreau
bb2db6b He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him every day by day, and the divine being established. Henry David Thoreau
e5caf51 The ways by which you may get your money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earn money 'merely' is to be truly idle or worse. If the labourer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself.. If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for.. You must get your.. Henry David Thoreau
c9153cc Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. Henry David Thoreau
462e53c It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. literature reading words Henry David Thoreau
8d4cd78 he rated it as a gain in coming to America, that here you could get tea, and coffee, and meat every day. But the only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these, and where the state does not endeavor to compel you to sustain the slavery and war and other superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly result from the use of such things. Henry David Thoreau
fc4f981 When formerly I was looking about to see what I could do for a living... I thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely I could do. Henry David Thoreau
5f10cc7 To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exlcude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Henry David Thoreau
f62aa0e The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it. artists ideas life poets reality walden Henry David Thoreau
a620a6f So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. life possibility Henry David Thoreau
5366360 The stars are God's dreams, thoughts remembered in the silence of his night. henry david thoreau
db1c13f The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends. Henry David Thoreau
4f67416 How can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely, and enjoy it? Henry David Thoreau
8615d06 Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. Thoreau Hd
b8e50cd We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our heads, - and then we can hardly see anything else. Henry David Thoreau
7d6863a Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives.. poor saving working Henry David Thoreau
52681ee What distinguishes that summit above the earthly line, is that it is unhandselled, awful, grand. It can never become familiar; you are lost the moment you set foot there. You know the path, but wander, thrilled, over the bare and pathless rock, as if it were solidified air and cloud. That rocky, misty summit, secreted in the clouds, was far more thrillingly awful and sublime than the crater of a volcano spouting fire (HENRY DAVID THOREAU, J.. Jon Krakauer
08730f2 Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven. Henry David Thoreau
291b907 It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. literature perception reading words Henry David Thoreau
b95fa2d It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time. Often in a snow storm, even by day, one will come out upon a well-known road and yet find it impossible to tell which way leads to the village. Though he knows that he has travelled it a thousand times, he cannot recognize a feature in it, but it is as strange to him as if it were a road in Siberia. By night, of course, the perplexity is infi.. Henry David Thoreau
afac99e If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. nature nature-s-beauty productivity Henry David Thoreau
b4574be You shall see rude and sturdy, experienced and wise men, keeping their castles, or teaming up their summer's wood, or chopping alone in the woods, men fuller of talk and rare adventure in the sun and wind and rain, than a chestnut is of meat; who were out not only in '75 and 1812, but have been out every day of their lives; greater men than Homer, or Chaucer, or Shakespeare, only they never got time to say so; they never took to the way of .. inspirational-life life-philosophy nature transcendence work Henry David Thoreau
7581106 There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I Henry David Thoreau
8c00253 Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life, as a dog does his master's chaise. Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still. life living Henry David Thoreau
0cc20be The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get "a good job," but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it." Henry David Thoreau
4ad995e The American woods have been unnerving people for 300 years. The inestimably priggish and tiresome Henry David Thoreau thought nature was splendid, splendid indeed, so long as he could stroll to town for cakes and barley wine, but when he experienced real wilderness, on a vist to Katahdin in 1846, he was unnerved to the cored. This wasn't the tame world of overgrown orchards and sun-dappled paths that passed for wilderness in suburban Conco.. hiking nature thoreau wilderness Bill Bryson
ecc9ffb The celebrated opening image of 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' is another case in point: Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table... How, the reader wonders, can the evening look like an anaesthetised body? Yet the point surely lies as much in the force of this bizarre image as in its meaning. We are in a modern world in which settled correspondences or traditiona.. Terry Eagleton
499cac4 It is always reassuring to discover that great writers are as fallible as oneself. W.B. Yeats once failed to obtain an academic post in Dublin because he misspelt the word 'professor' on his application. Terry Eagleton
eab9cb3 Certain American uses of deconstruction, Derrida has observed, work to ensure 'an institutional closure' which serves the dominant political and economic interests of American society. Derrida is clearly out to do more than develop new techniques of reading: deconstruction is for him an ultimately political practice, an attempt to dismantle the logic by which a particular system of thought, and behind that a whole system of political struct.. deconstruction derrida language meaning relativism truth Terry Eagleton
6055bc6 People laughed less and grumbled more, sang less and shouted more, and the sounds they made grew louder and uglier. It became difficult to hear even the birds or the breeze, and soon everyone stopped listening for them. Norton Juster
eac11f9 There's lots to do; we have a very busy schedule---- "At 8 o'clock we get up, and then we spend "From 8 to 9 daydreaming. "From 9 to 9:30 we take our early midmorning nap. "From 9:30 to 10:30 we dawdle and delay. "From 10:30 to 11:30 we take our late early morning nap. "From 11:30 to 12:00 we bide our time and then eat lunch. "From 1:00 to 2:00 we linger and loiter. "From 2:00 to 2:30 we take our early afternoon nap. "From 2:30 to 3:30 we p.. Norton Juster
a7817ba But I'm afraid it can't be done." "Certainly not; it can't be done," repeated the Humbug. "Why not?" asked Milo. "Why not indeed?" exclaimed the bug, who seemed equally at home on either side of an argument. "Much too difficult," replied the king. "Of course," emphasized the bug, "much too difficult." "You could if you really wanted to," insisted Milo. "By all means, if you really wanted to, you could," the Humbug agreed. "How?" asked Azaz,.. Norton Juster
cc2a5a0 what you can do is often a matter of what you will do. Norton Juster
abc622c Did you hear?" he asked. "They found another body around nine this morning. It's the Ripper, definitely." "Good morning," I replied. "Morning. Listen to this. The second victim..." Maureen Johnson
e054d45 Before I take you into the beating heart of the story, let's get one thing out of the way. I know from experience that when it comes up later, it will distract you so much that you won't be able to concentrate on anything else I will tell you. My name is Jubilee Dougal. Take a moment and let it sink in. Maureen Johnson
8f7f4c3 Some nutter's gone and pulled a Jack the Ripper. Maureen Johnson
98b1519 He was the closest thing she had to a pony. Maureen Johnson
aadd2ab We all know what we're doing. Whether we realize it or not. Maureen Johnson
5baf312 No one in history had ever done less and yet been so wrong. Maureen Johnson