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Tag Archives: quotes

Enemies Steeped in Irony

My greatest enemies are Woman and the Sea. These things I hate. Women because they are weak and stupid and love in the shadow of men and are nothing compared to them, and the sea because it has always frustrated me, destroying what I have built, washing away what I have left, wiping clean the […]

But Time Had Done It

It was a curious thing about Berkeley and Denys,—who were so deeply regretted by their friends in England when they emigrated, and so much beloved and admired in the Colony,—that they should be all the same, outcasts. It was not a society that had thrown them out, and not any place in the whole world […]

Two Lions in the Stockade

By now all the school-children were coming out of the school, pouring down the road to stop in sight of us and there to cry out in a low soft voice: “Msabu. Are you there? Are you there? Msabu, Msabu.” I sat on a lion and cried back to them: “Yes I am.” Then they […]

Why is the Steppe Barren?

“No, no,” Mitya, as it were, still did not understand. “Tell me why it is those poor mothers stand there? Why are people poor? Why is the babe poor? Why is the steppe barren? Why don’t they hug each other and kiss? Why don’t they sing songs of joy? Why are they so dark from […]

But Let’s Not Grade the Precipices

I knew a young lady of the last “romantic” generation who after some years of an enigmatic passion for a gentleman, whom she might quite easily have married at any moment, invented insuperable obstacles to their union, and ended by throwing herself one stormy night into a rather deep and rapid river from a high […]

To be a Strange Old Man Also

“I’ll kill him though,” he said. “In all his greatness and his glory.” Although it is unjust, he thought. But I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures. “I told the boy I was a strange old man,” he said. “Now is when I must prove it.” The thousand […]

My Bus will be Pulled by Geese

Your destination is North. The map that you are using is a mirror. You are always pulling the bits out of your bare feet, the pieces of the map that broke off and fell on the ground as the Snow Queen flew overhead in her sleigh. Where you are, where you are coming from, it […]

Snake’s-hands

Path is like a snake, it curls around the whole of Little Belaire with its head in the middle and the tip of its tail by Buckle cord’s door, but only someone who knows Little Belaire can see where it runs. To someone else, it would seem to run off in all directions. So when […]

And then went down to the ship

And then went down to the ship, Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and We set up mast and sail on that swart ship, Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also Heavy with weeping, so winds from sternward Bore us out onward with bellying canvas, Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess. […]

Judge All These in a Room Together

Being aware of the history of literature—or of any other art, for that matter—is really a form of unbelieving, a form of skepticism. If I say to my self, for example, that Wordsworth and Verlaine were very good nineteenth-century poets, then I may fall into the danger of thinking that time has some how destroyed […]